


Here I Learned Certain Things

by rosepetalfall



Category: History Boys (2006), History Boys - All Media Types, History Boys - Bennett
Genre: Coming of Age, F/M, Future Fic, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-26
Updated: 2015-07-26
Packaged: 2018-04-11 09:28:37
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 19,581
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4430108
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rosepetalfall/pseuds/rosepetalfall
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"I passed by the school where I studied as a boy<br/>and said in my heart: here I learned certain things<br/>and didn't learn others. All my life I have loved in vain<br/>the things I didn't learn."</p><p>"The School Where I Studied," by Yehuda Amichai, translated by Chana Bloch and Chana Kronfeld.</p><p>-</p><p>When Scripps gets to Oxford, certain things change and others don't. Or: Don Scripps grows up and, however slowly, attempts to come to terms with God, love, and himself.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Here I Learned Certain Things

**Author's Note:**

> This is self-indulgent university fic, which took me all of college to finally finish. 
> 
> I am American and I am sure that there Americanisms in here, so please, if you see anything I can correct, let me know! Thank you! Hope you enjoy. 
> 
> References are footnoted in the end notes.

There was never any more inception than there is now,  
Nor any more youth or age than there is now,  
And will never be any more perfection than there is now,  
Nor any more heaven or hell than there is now.  
\- Song of Myself, Walt Whitman

 

A week before Scripps leaves for Oxford, his dad gives him a leather-bound copy of _David Copperfield_. 

Scripps loves his dad but they don’t have a lot in common, apart from a tendency to at least attempt to avoid familial conflict, an appreciation for Dickens, and a deep desire to avoid another Sunday lunch with their overly enthusiastic new neighbors.

“It seemed a good book. To send you off with. Beginnings and all,” his dad says, patting the cover. 

“Thanks, Dad,” Scripps replies. He’s touched, actually. His dad’s proud of him, for Oxford, Don knows that. It means something, though, to have a physical reminder. 

In the evening, he copies out _Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show_ into his new journal. 1

-

When the term begins, as it must, the Oxford boys see each other, periodically. This is actually slightly startling. 

Dakin, unsurprisingly perhaps, takes to the Oxford social scene with ease. There are, however, instances during which even his sleek transition is somewhat marred by the Cutler boys’ general lack of exposure to what might be called the urbane. 

_Despite one’s best efforts and acting abilities,_ Scripps notes in his journal, _one cannot be fully prepared for a discussion on Marcel Duchamp over drinks when one only knows about that urinal piece and not the crossdressing. It seems somehow odd that no one ever taught us about Modern Art. Or maybe the art teacher tried and failed - even before that final push I never could seem to retain anything she said. There’s likely some commentary on curriculum or the British class system in here, though what in particular escapes me. On the other hand, difficult to imagine Dad or far worse, Felix, fancying Dadism, so there’s also that._

_A final thought - or question rather: Does it mean anything that I do genuinely like Turner?_

There are only so many lies or exaggerations even Dakin can pull off with ease. As a result, Scripps supposes, it must be rather reassuring for Dakin to pop by and drag Scripps out for a pint, to be once again on the receiving end of Akthar's smirking twirl of a pencil, to occasionally laugh at a rather oblivious or perhaps uncaring Rudge (who, apart from Dakin, seems to have adapted or perhaps not adapted with the greatest speed). And of course, to be (now somewhat distractedly and increasingly intermittently) adored by Posner. 

“I haven’t got the time,” Posner says, blinking like he’s just surfaced from some gripping dream, when Dakin swings into his doorway, saying Scripps and he are going for a drink, so come along, now, Pos. “I’m too busy getting all of my previous conceptions of the world undermined by French theorists and Allen Ginsberg.” Turning to Scripps, Pos asks, “Why didn’t anyone ever tell us about all this?” 

He sounds lost, half bewildered, half in awe, the way Scripps always imagines the less foolhardy conquistadores must have been, stumbling upon the New World. 

“I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness,” Scripps quotes, absently. He’d only read _Howl_ two weeks ago, though it hadn’t left the effect on him that it evidently had on Posner. 

“Cheerful man, clearly,” Dakin says, already half out the door again. “Come on, then, Scripps.”

Scripps raises his eyebrows at Posner and shrugs. “I’ll see you.”

“Yeah,” Posner agrees. 

-

Dakin’s ego stroking aside, it’s Posner that Scripps sees most often, their first year, through the result of a coincidence. 

Scripps strikes up a friendship with a girl named Beatrice, who lives on his staircase, during his first week. She’d come and knocked on his door, to introduce herself, as his mum was arranging things and holding back embarrassing sniffles. (She’d not really needed to come down at all, but Don’s her middle child and also her _oddest_ child, what with the love for Jesus and jazz piano, and she tries a bit too hard to make sure he doesn’t feel it, as though that were really a concern.) 

Scripps had liked Beatrice’s Shakespearean name, her forthright handshake, and the speed with which she ascertained that they were going to be friends. (It had occurred to Scripps, that summer, that it had been quite some years since he’d had to befriend anyone new. It made him feel an odd pang of sympathy for Irwin, wherever he was now, though of course that situation hadn’t been the same, or wasn’t meant to have been, anyhow.)

A few weeks into term, Beatrice meets Posner, at some event for the new Jewish students, because he had also apparently sought refuge from the getting to know you games by the staircase. 

After that, Don sees quite a bit of Posner and it’s rather a relief, to glance up from a bout of note-taking and once again see him tapping a pen lightly against his cheek, eyebrows slightly furrowed. 

In any case, seeing more of Posner means seeing more of Akthar. Akthar and Posner are both at Magdalen and live two floors away from one another and thus still see each other with enough frequency that Posner will often show up to a planned study session with Akthar in tow. 

It’s not bad, those first few weeks, for all that it’s overwhelming and Scripps finds that despite all the things he has stored up in his brain, he is actually singularly unprepared. 

He does quite a bit of polite smiling and fakes enthusiasm for paintings he’s never seen and musicians he’s never heard play.

“I lie all the time, now,” Scripps says to Akthar, one evening, perhaps five weeks into term. 

Akthar shrugs. “Well, it’s not like we haven’t got practice,” he says. Then he looks back down to the article he’s reading, frowns, and underlines approximately an entire paragraph. 

“Right,” Scripps says. 

-

In late November, Don meets Lily. 

“Don, this is Lily,” says Nate, who’s in Don’s class on the Napoleonic Wars. “I thought you should meet,” he says gesturing theatrically between them. “Lily’s a mathematician, but don’t worry, she loves Auden and making awful jokes about Victor Hugo as well, so you’re temperamentally suited, I think.”

“I don’t -” Scripps protests.

“I’m sorry about him,” Lily says, rolling her eyes. “He’s terribly entitled.”

“Off with his head,” Don agrees.

Lily throws her head back and laughs, throwing her wild curls into disarray. 

“I love _Alice in Wonderland_ ,” she says, grinning. “Have you been to see the dodo yet? Unless,” she adds, frowning, “you were making a French Revolution reference. Or am I just reading too much into that one comment?”

“Oh, well. Either works,” Don says, who’s not sure he was really making much of a reference at all. 

He’s charmed, though, by her.

“Everyone’s so clever here, I’m always second-guessing myself,” Lily confesses easily. “And witty, as well, which makes things worse. I find it difficult to be witty about geometry or calculus on the spot.”

“Yes,” Don agrees. “I can see how that would be demanding.” 

He doesn’t know much about maths but he thinks he’d like to know her. She’s forthright in a way many people at Oxford only pretend at. He admires that.

“Mate,” Nate says to him, quietly, on the walk back, “Lily’s got a boyfriend. In London, at UCL.”

“Alright,” Don says.

“I just thought you should know, in case,” Nate mumbles, sticking his hands in his coat pockets. 

“Calm down, Nathaniel,” Don says, looking up at the night sky over Oxford’s cobblestones. “I only just met her. Whatever your ambitions, we’re not actually in a Shakespeare play.”

“I just thought you two would make good friends,” Nate says.

“I’m sure we will,” Don replies, easily enough.

That night, before willing himself to sleep, he writes in his journal:

_I wonder if this is how other people’s romances begin - with an unexpected desire to know someone._

_Nate wasn’t entirely wrong in his assumptions - Lily is beautiful - but I don’t know that he was exactly right. I suppose I am interested, but in her love of Lewis Carroll as much as anything else._

_Not that the rest of it matters, of course, with present impediments._

_Another thing to lock away, I suppose. Luckily, I’m talented at that._

-

Now, Scripps finds it harder to write, sometimes, like he once did. His sentences are becoming shorter and his paragraphs meander less. Clarity above all. It’s better, probably. 

“More Hemingway, less Fitzgerald,” Dakin muses. “Though, I did always like Hemingway better.”

“Of course you did,” Scripps says, too tired to roll his eyes.

“Trying to say something?” Dakin asks.

“Nah. Just that bullfights do seem up your alley.”

“You know, I think they are,” Dakin smirks. “I should like to go to Spain.”

“Wouldn’t be surprised if you did,” Scripps says. 

“Though bull-running does seem rather excessive,” Dakin says. “I prefer my limbs in tact.”

Scripps winces, wonders vaguely what Irwin’s up to these days but then forcibly, if not very effectively, puts it out of his mind. 

-

A week or so later, at some teashop they’ve just discovered, Beatrice asks, “Are you quite alright, Don? You seem distracted.”

“Do I? I’m fine.” Beatrice’s assessment is more correct than Don would like - he had been pondering, again, whether it was possible to consciously conquer a likely doomed attraction.

“Are you really?” Beatrice asks, skeptical. 

Pos rushes in, at this point, bringing in a gush of cold December wind with him. Slightly behind him comes Layla, another recent friend, in a blazer, looking, in comparison to Posner, remarkably sedate. 

“Sorry, sorry, I ran into my tutor on the way here. We started talking about the book for this week - we’re doing Emerson - talking about Romanticism and religion and intellectual history, or well, we’re meant to be - and I feel the more I read the less I understand, actually.” Posner says all this in a rush, almost panting, falling into an empty chair with a surprisingly heavy thump. “Transcendentalists are so -” he waves his hand vaguely. 

“Articulate,” Don says dryly. 

Layla snorts and pulls out a chair for herself, dropping a bookbag on the ground. 

“I have decidedly not become a ‘transparent eyeball.’ Is that better?” Posner replies.2

Beatrice’s lips curve up around the edge of coffee mug, but she turns pointedly towards Layla. “Hello, Layla. Have you met Don before?”

“Once, I think,” Layla offers, like she’s certain but willing to couch the possibility of having met in potentiality, in case Don has forgotten. “We all went to the cinema to see _A Passage to India_?”

He hasn’t forgotten. (She and Akthar had walked over together and Scripps and Posner had spotted the two a distance out, close enough to bump shoulders. The sun had been setting behind them and had imbued the scene with a sense of intimate significance.)

“Yes, that’s right,” Don agrees. 

“So, what we were talking about?” Posner inquires. 

“Nothing,” Don says. 

Beatrice looks at Don for a long moment, smile falling, eyebrows just so slightly furrowed, and then, finally, says, “Nothing, apparently.”

-

When asked, that first year, Scripps tells everyone he’s happy, very much so, amongst the spires and the old stones and the sudden, recurrent, awed realizations that yes, this is the Bodleian Library he’s in. (He goes there, sometimes, just to imagine the centuries of scholars who have been here before him.)

It’s not a lie. 

His professors talk about the politics of historiography, about Raymond Williams and mass culture, about the myths and facts of Great Men, about the slippery nature of truth in history. 

It’s sacrilege. It’s enlightenment.

It’s a bit dispiriting. (It’s remarkable and frightening and . . . something else Scripps can’t name.)

And, so. Happiness. 

There are shades, perhaps, between lies and the truth. 

He goes home at Christmas and feels both present and removed from his body. In his journal he jots, _But is that really so different than before? Possibly what the faith bit was about, anyway? Not that I’ve quite lost it. Yet._

He brushes light fingers over his childhood possessions. 

He walks through the shadows of his earlier selves and eats sweets on the couch with his little sister, Abby, who chatters away, filling him in on the various bits of gossip he’s missed. Apparently Tommy Masterson’s younger sister finally got caught cheating on some exam and it’s past time because she’s been doing it for ages. 

“Ah,” Don says, “very dramatic.”

Abby nods emphatically.

His dad and his friends sit around talking about the miners’ strike, voicing a kind of boozy lament for the working man. All things considered, Don thinks his mum’s choice of packing up canned goods and shipping them to County Durham is the better one - useful, thoughtful, and direct action. 

A habit Don thinks he ought to cultivate himself.

-

“D’you have time to accompany me sometime?” Posner asks, one snowy afternoon in early in the new term, when they’re working in his room. “I’ve got a piece I want to practice.”

“Possibly,” Scripps replies, filing through his assignments mentally. “I should have time. What for? Just for fun?” It might be nice, to do something utterly unrelated, something without need; he hasn’t, for a while, and he doesn’t think Pos has either, though he can’t be sure - he hasn’t seen much of Posner since they all got back to Oxford after Christmas.

“Audition, actually. Thought I might go in for a musical,” Posner says, looking down at his book.

“Oh, that would be brilliant,” Beatrice says. “Which musical?”

Posner shrugs an avian shoulder blade. “I don’t know yet. Whichever will take me, I suppose.”

“Oh, David, stop being so self-deprecating. You’re a fantastic singer! And Don always says you were brilliant at acting at school,” Beatrice replies, pushing at Posner’s arm, causing him to sway lightly. 

Scripps smiles, feeling vaguely caught out somehow. 

Posner scratches his arm and mutters, “Well, it’s been rather a while, is all. I thought - or the doctor thought - doing something I enjoyed might be good for me.”

Scripps looks away, feeling suddenly tired and very distant from the person he’d been only a year ago.

-

_Have become her friend, which one assumes, in the best cases, is two-thirds the journey anyhow. God gave me all this hesitance for a reason, apparently._

“You know, I always thought I was clever,” Lily says, morosely, from where she’s sitting tucked into the windowsill, watching people walk by.

“Are you not, then?” Don asks.

Lily makes an overly disapproving face at him. “You’re supposed to sympathetic, Donald.”

“Sorry, shall I try again?” 

Lily smiles. “You’re awful, you know that?”

“No one has ever said that about me, I’ll have you know.”

“And what do they say?” she asks, grinning. “Oh, that Don Scripps, what a nice boy,” she says in an affected voice.

“Oh, always. I am nice,” Don replies. 

“I should have thought you wouldn’t like that word, nice,” Lily comments. “Too . . . vacant.”

“I don’t particularly,” Don agrees. “But it’s not the worst thing for a person to be, is it?”

“No, it’s certainly not.”

-

“Have you fallen out of love with Dakin, then?” Scripps asks. It’s April and the sky is so beautifully clear that Don is distracted from his work. And for some reason he has to ask. 

“Hmm?” Posner asks, looking up from his book and his coffee. 

The coffee drinking is a new habit (or else Scripps really does see Posner even less than he realized), picked up largely because he’s so taken with the bohemian coffeehouse they’re currently in and not because Pos is actually fond of coffee, if the amount of cream and sugar he adds is any indication.

“Dakin?” Scripps prompts. “Has the devotion fallen away now that you hardly see him?”

“Oh,” Posner says, registering. “I suppose.”

“You suppose? Rather lacking in conviction.”

Posner opens his mouth, closes it again and pauses. Another new habit, reticence. Or perhaps it’s caution. 

“I hoped I would. Fall out of love with Dakin,” he says, tapping a finger against his mug. “Only it’s been different than I imagined. It didn’t disappear. I didn’t become some new self, reborn all bold and new and uncaring.” Posner pauses, almost affectionately, over the imagined vision of himself, then seems to settle back into his body, sharper about the edges of his eyes. “It just feels as if I haven’t the time any more, mostly,” he ends, matter of factly.

“To be in love?” Scripps asks, unable to hold back a laugh.

“Oh, shut up,” Posner grumbles, throwing a scrunched up napkin at him. “I meant even to think about it. Anyway, being in love with Dakin was unduly time-consuming.”

“I remember. I was there.”

“Well, exactly,” Posner says tartly. “We’re at Oxford, now. If I’m going to be infatuated with someone, I’d rather it be with someone who could teach me how to punt properly, at least.”

“Lovers being the best way to acquire such skills, naturally.”

“Well, it is much harder than they make it look,” Posner says, frowning slightly, tapping his thumb against his mug. “I saw someone get their pole caught in a tree branch the other day. Complete struggle to get it back down. It was such a disaster that I really couldn’t look away.” Posner looks thoughtful. “I’ve developed quite a lot of sympathy for the people who work there,” he remarks. 

After a slight shake of his head, he turns back to the book he’s marking up.

“Alright, I’ll concede the punting,” Scripps says, amused in spite of himself. “But still, that’s a bit of an _enterprising_ approach to love, isn’t it?” Scripps asks, knowing he’s being distracting, needing to ask further.

Posner sighs and looks up. “But I’m not in love. And I don’t think I really was then, either. I was _young_ , etcetra, etcetra. Wasn’t that the point of this conversation?”

“I suppose,” Scripps says, discomforted, fiddling with his teaspoon.

“Rather lacking in conviction,” Posner throws back. “One might even suspect you had some ulterior motive in asking.”

Scripps ought to have expected that. He smiles, wry, and looks at his hands, though as he’s discovered, they haven’t got any answers either. 

Sadly, silence is still enough for Posner, always so clever, to read.

“Are you alright, Scrippsy?” Posner asks quietly, head tilted sideways. “Is something bothering you?”

It’s terribly kind and also just terrible. Scripps is used to being the one on the outside, watching with amusement, tolerance, indulgence.

“No, of course not.” Having been so attached to the truth most of his life, Don is still only a passable liar. 

Posner frowns. “Is there someone - you could tell me, Don.”

“No, it’s nothing,” Scripps stumbles.

“Oh, Scrippsy,” Posner murmurs. 

“Don’t start, Pos, please,” Scripps says. He can’t do this, not with Posner, David, who he’s known since they were children, who’s never quite needed his protection but whom he always felt obligated to protect, anyhow. 

“Well, that doesn’t sound like nothing, Don,” Posner says, voice pitched low, barely audible above the bustle. “It might not be nothing for her, either. That’s all.”

“Ah, but, _Do I dare / disturb the universe?_ ” Scripps asks. He’s not morose but he’s not exactly known for taking action, either, isn’t even sure if he wants to. 

Posner taps a finger against his mug again and then after a moment finally counters with, “Yes, but that’s the problem, isn’t it. _‘And in short, I was afraid.’_ One can love the poem, but it’s hardly a manifesto on how to live life.” 3

Scripps groans. “Don’t lecture me on Eliot. It’s unfair. Let me have my comforts, please.”

“Well,” Posner says, flat and slightly tired, “as they say, life’s not fair, Scrippsy.”

-

In May, with exams around the corner and the weather finally abandoning intermittent bouts of misty rain in favor of conceding that yes, the English spring the poets wrote about did, in fact, exist, Scripps finds himself spending ever more time with Lily. 

“Where’ve you been the past few weeks?” Beatrice asks. “You’re coming to David’s musical, aren’t you?”

Scripps blinks. “Yeah, of course.”

“You don’t remember when it is, do you?” she asks shrewdly.

“I wrote it down. Somewhere.” Scripps is very much not in charge of his own life at the moment, not that he’s ever fully believed he was. He does feel guilty though, so that, at least, is familiar.

“Ah. Good. You’ve written it down somewhere.”

“Beatrice.”

“It’s this weekend,” Beatrice allows, utterly dry. “Saturday evening, if you’d like to join me. That’s the last performance, so you ought to.”

Scripps does go, of course. 

“Oh, _My Fair Lady_?” Lily asks, her eyes lighting up. “I’ve been wanting to see it - I’ve heard it’s a brilliant production. Who’s your friend playing?”

“Freddy, I think,” Scripps says, trying to remember.

Lily grins. “Brilliant! Does he look like Jeremy Brett at all?”

Scripps laughs. “Not in the least.” 

“Well,” she says, “no matter! I’m sure he’ll be wonderful anyhow. Do you mind me coming along, Don?”

“Of course not,” he says, the back of his neck flushing. 

The theater’s rather crowded and it’s hard to find Beatrice at first, even with her frantic waving. 

Pos is really quite good, though the transformation is momentarily rather startling, as it always is, when Scripps is in the audience, rather than at the piano bench. Posner’s earnest and straight-backed and rather handsome in his romantic enthusiasm - his Freddy entirely lacks the melancholy Don sometimes thinks Posner deliberately cultivates. 

The broad-shouldered, blond Professor Higgins throws an arm around Pos’s shoulders as they walk off stage after the bows, pulling them together and grinning, whispering something into Posner’s ear. 

Scripps spares a moment to raise a questioning eyebrow at Beatrice, who shrugs and says neutrally, “With rehearsals and all, they’ve been spending a lot of time together. You know how these things go.”

Scripps thinks that it’s probably quite evident that he doesn’t, in fact, know how these things go, given his present situation, but refrains from commenting.

Lily looks curious, but doesn’t ask. When they find Pos, after a bit of struggle with the crowd, Don does introductions. 

Lily shakes Posner’s hand. Posner looks a little confused, a little amused. 

Lily beams and says, “You were brilliant! I don’t know why we’ve never met before. You have such a nice voice!”

“Oh,” Posner blinks. “Thank you.” His hair is starting to go into disarray, breaking softly away from the gel trying to control it. “I suppose it is a bit strange we’ve never met before.”

“I know! I’ve heard so much about you,” Lily says. “I suppose you can tell me about all the trouble Don got up to when he was younger.”

Posner gives a surprised huff of almost-laughter. “I do hate to disappoint but Don was only ever really trouble when he decided to enable whatever ill-advised schemes one of the rest of us came up with. I think it amused him.”

Beatrice laughs and Lily smiles. 

Don is about to protest the characterization, though he’s not sure whether he’s more bothered by being thought of as gleefully devious or dull and obedient, but then the tall, blond Professor Higgins comes up and asks, genially, and apparently Scottish, “Drinks, then? Hello, Beatrice, finally graced us with your presence?”

“You should feel honoured,” Beatrice says. “Not bad tonight, Duncan.”

“Damning me with faint praise, Kaufman? That’s cruel.” 

“Duncan, this is Don and Lily,” Posner says, cutting in. “Don and I were at school together.”

“Yes,” Don agrees, amused at the way the introduction is both true and yet manages to elide the many long summers of scraped knees they’ve shared, “primary, grammar, Oxford now.”

“Really?” Duncan asks. “Well, isn’t that adorable? Alex Duncan, pleasure to meet you both. The cast and crew are going for drinks. Would you like to come along?”

Beatrice shakes her head, “I’ll pass. Must rise early tomorrow.”

Lily looks at Scripps and shrugs. Don looks at Posner, standing with easy intimacy slightly too close to Duncan, and says, “No, that’s alright.”

-

A week and a half later, Lily breaks up with the UCL boyfriend.

“It’s,” she sighs. “It’s alright. It wasn’t unexpected. Neither of us was in Reading, anymore. London’s more, you know, exciting.” She pauses and frowns and mutters, “I just wish he’d waited until after exams, at least. We’ve known each other since we were twelve.”

Scripps hums, sympathetic without the necessary experience to be empathetic, and sits through two more cups of tea and another several rounds of Morrissey asking, _So what difference does it make?_ 4 He rubs her shoulder, warm even through her wrinkled blouse and feels the whole situation bears a discomforting resemblance to cheering up his little sister after some perceived affront. 

Walking back alone, Scripps thinks he ought to feel a bit triumphant, but he doesn’t really. He’s not the one who took action and Lily may be fairly calm, but she’s not happy. He oughtn’t take this as a sign, or he might become too dependent on the mysterious workings of universe turning in his favor. 

When they go home that summer, he’s still not done anything about the Situation, but he promises to Lily that he’ll write, or call sometimes. 

“I am expecting you to keep your promise,” she says seriously. 

“I will,” he says. It comes out as an oath, like joining the knighthood. Or the holy orders. 

He wonders if he’s said too much. 

\- 

Going home to Sheffield for summer is odd, but also oddly comforting. 

“Writing letters again?” Dakin asks, shameless yet somehow disinterested, looking over Scripps’ shoulder. “I thought the ambition was a novel?” 

“Haven’t you got better things to be doing?” Scripps asks, pulling the sheets of paper away from prying eyes. 

“Always,” Dakin says, sprawling on Scripps’ bed. “But one must take some time for the masses.” 

“Have you become the Pope while I was looking away?” 

“I was thinking more like the Prince of Monaco. I mean, what’s the bastard even do, other than have fantastic amounts of money?” 

“Marry film stars, I suppose,” Scripps offers, turning away from his desk. 

“That is true,” Dakin says thoughtfully. “Wouldn’t mind that either.” 

Don snorts and decides to leave the letter for later. Love, he tells himself, ought not occupy all his time. 

\- 

Rather illogically, the Cutler’s boys don’t see much more of each other over the summer than they do during the year. This is partly, of course, because not all of them have come back. Dakin had been around but then gone down to London instead, and is working, drinking, and having copious amounts of sex, according to his phone calls. Crowther’s gone to Edinburgh, for reasons Scripps isn’t quite clear on, and Lockwood and Timms have stayed in Cambridge, to be dissolute, probably. 

Scripps runs into Posner and Akthar on the street on Saturday morning. 

“Still living then?” he asks, rather sheepish. 

“Could ask you the same thing,” Akthar returns genially. “I’ve seen Peter more than I’ve seen you.” 

“I’ve seen your vicar more often than I’ve seen you,” Posner adds tartly. 

“Well, I don’t know where the two of you’ve been either. You’ve not exactly been banging on my door,” Scripps replies, without any venom. 

“Now that I’ve learned to drive my cousin Hannah’s turned me into a courier service for the children,” Posner says, with a countenance of dramatic suffering. 

Akthar rolls his eyes. 

“Also, I’ve been working,” Posner adds more matter of factly. “And you know the family.” 

“Same, working and appeasing the many relations,” Akthar agrees. “You?” 

“Making copies and tea at the paper. And becoming a recluse, I think,” Scripps offers wryly. 

“Well, I suppose that is the next step after celibacy,” Akthar grins. 

“A recluse like Dickinson, or more like J.D. Salinger?” Posner inquires. 

“Neither, I imagine. They’ve both been published.” 

“Well, curiosity begged the question,” Posner says. “I need to know whether I’ll have to smuggle your notebooks out to a publisher or whether you’ll arrange for that yourself.” 

“Maybe I’m Harper Lee and my one great work is imminent,” Scripps speculates. 

“Greta Garbo,” Akthar offers, wicked. “Get fabulously famous, drop out of sight.” 

“Well, I think that’s the least likely, don’t you?” Scripps laughs. 

“We’ll buy you a wig,” Posner says solemnly. 

Scripps grins. He’s not felt _pleased_ in a while, he realizes, even with the letters flying back and forth between him and Lily. Her parents are taking her to Paris for her birthday and closest Don’s ever been to the Continent is his aunt’s place in Portsmouth. 

Posner smiles back, looking less tired than the last time Scripps had seen him, in passing, during exams. 

“I’ve got to go get Esther and her terrible little friends from dance class now, but if you can take some time away from the hermitage, come over for dinner tomorrow,” Posner says, sticking his hands in his pockets. “This one’s already coming,” he nods towards Akthar, “so we might as well round out the Abrahamic traditions. Oh, and bring your sister, too, if she wants.” 

“Naz is coming so she can get away from the parents, though nominally so she can borrow some books,” Akthar explains. “She dyed her hair last week.” 

“What color?” Scripps inquires. 

“Purple,” Akthar says. “The things children get up to these days.” 

“I think Mum and Dad’d be relieved if Abby dyed her hair, after having to deal with me,” Scripps muses. “At least they’d have precedence for that.” 

“Abigail with the lavender hair,” Posner says. “Sounds like something the lit mag would publish.” 

“Well, don’t encourage her,” Scripps laughs. “I need an ally.” 

Scripps does come for dinner and brings an initially reluctant Abby. 

Posner opens the door, wearing black-framed glasses. 

“Well, cheers, Buddy Holly,” Don says, amused. 

Posner frowns, adjust his frames and says, “Oh, as if you’re any better. Your reading glasses are hideous.” Abby chokes. “And I can’t help it if all that reading is making me go blind.” 

Don coughs, to hold back the obvious innuendo he’d make if his baby sister wasn’t present and Posner wasn’t glaring at him with a clear promise of vengeance if he did. 

“Hello, Abby! Come in,” Posner continues, more genial. 

“Well, that’s charming,” Don answers. “Am I just the chauffeur now?” 

Abby shoves past him, face bright red, muttering, “Oh my God, you are so _humiliating_.” 

Posner smirks. 

The glasses rather suit him, Scripps decides. They make him look older, along with the longer hair. 

\- 

Lily sends postcards, more often than letters. 

_Dear Don,_

_France is altogether another world. I can’t find the words for it - I’m sure you could, with your poetry at the drop of a hat. I haven’t got your talent. I rarely regret being a mathematician, for as you know I think there ought to be more of us, but I find I almost regret it now, being so often at a loss for words. So you will have to wait until I develop my photographs, though it’s more a place for paintings, I think._

\- 

Autumn comes again, Keats’ “season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,” bringing with it the promise of falling leaves and a return to Oxford. 5

Don’s older brother Oliver offers, offhandedly, to come over into Sheffield and drive him down. Though they get on well enough now that they’re older and have outgrown childhood disagreements, Don is not altogether eager to spend several hours navigating to Oxford with him. Don is certain there is no one quite so terrible at following road signs as his dear older brother. 

He is relieved when Ollie’s girlfriend ends up requiring his assistance (something to do with new furniture) that weekend, even if their mother is entirely displeased. 

He takes the train down, with Dakin, but tunes him out to watch England roll by, out the window. 

\- 

There’s a knock on Scripps’s door on a crisp Friday afternoon in October, not long after he’s abandoned his tome on the Congress of Vienna in favor of re-reading David Copperfield for the comfortable familiarity of it. 

He pulls open his door and it’s Posner, hair disordered and eyes wild. 

"Pos?” Scripps asks, instantly concerned. (It’s been two weeks - probably a bit more - since he last saw Posner and suddenly he feels terribly guilty about it, even though he blames the beginning of the term rush to see all the people from far flung locales and to remind oneself how to work again.) 

“Do you really think God’s merciful?” Posner asks, still in the hallway. “How can you tell?” 

“Is something wrong?” Scripps asks. Pos looks pale, more than usual, and he’s frighteningly distracted, talking theology out of nowhere. “David?” 

Posner is unseeing. 

“David,” Scripps says, taking him by the elbow. “Come in.” He is gentle because Posner, for all his delicacy, has never looked quite so defeated before. “Sit down.” 

Pos listens, moving slowly, automatically. 

“Would you like a cup of tea? Should I put on some water?” 

“I don’t. I don’t know.” Posner stares at his hands, as if they have become new and strange to him. 

“Can you tell me what’s wrong?” Scripps asks, sitting down across from Posner, on his bed. Pos is in the only chair. 

“It’s my dad,” Pos says hollowly. “He’s in hospital.” 

“Oh, God,” Scripps mutters, involuntarily. Mr. Posner’s such a quiet man but always very, very kind and proud. 

“It’s alright,” Posner says, though his tone belies his words. “He’s - he’s stable, apparently. Whatever that means. It was his heart - he was having chest pains and they want to observe him,” he says, sounding as if he’s reading off something. 

“Christ.”

“Yes.” Posner swallows. “They weren’t going to tell me. They didn’t want to distract me or - or worry me. It was my uncle who called. God, my father’s in the hospital and they weren’t even going to tell me.” 

“You know now,” Scripps says, for lack of anything better coming to mind. He reaches out, squeezing Posner’s shoulder, oddly aware of muscle and bone. 

“It’s my birthday in two days,” Posner says bleakly. 

Not actually a non-sequitur, Don thinks. Posner, always the youngest, always catching up suddenly but belatedly - intensely conscious of age and its ramifications. 

And though he was trained to always have words at hand, Scripps finds he can say nothing. 

\- 

Scripps worries, of course. 

He comes around to Magdalen on Posner’s birthday, to find Akthar there, along with a few other people, having tea and apple pie. 

“Pie?” Scripps asks, a little lost. 

“Surely everyone likes pie,” says some blond bloke, who seems somehow familiar.

Posner smiles wanly. “I just spoke to Dad. He’s terribly jealous of all the food. The doctors are putting him on some kind of restricted diet.” 

Scripps nods and attempts to smile back. “Right, well, aren’t you going to offer me some, then?” 

When he walks back, he realizes the blond man, Duncan, was the handsy Professor Higgins from the spring. 

Right. 

\- 

Three days after that, Don’s world changes entirely. 

Lily comes in, out of the rain, looking slightly bedraggled and damp, but determined. 

“Look,” she says, “I don’t mean to presume or anything, but we’re mates, aren’t we? So you’ll let this just pass if you’re not interested?” 

“Sorry?” Don asks, at a loss. 

“No,” Lily shakes her head. “Let me start again. Don Scripps, would you like to go on a date on with me? I’m not looking for any kind of grand romance, but I like you and we get on and I’d like to go to dinner with you.” 

“Yes.” Don thinks, slightly, that he ought to be able to do more than just react at this juncture, but then Lily is the forthright one. 

“Yes?” Lily repeats. 

“Yeah. I’d like to go to dinner with you,” 

“Oh. Right, that’s - that’s good. Brilliant.” Lily beams and reaches out. 

Don goes to her, now assured. 

Kissing her is warm and a bit awkward at first, but Don wants, for once, to take a risk, and kisses back. 

“Alright,” Lily says, as she pulls back, nodding, “alright. That went better than expected. Would Thursday night work? For dinner?” 

“Yeah, Thursday, good,” Don agrees. 

Late on Thursday night, after dinner is over, standing on the lamp-lit street, Lily asks, fingers carding through Don’s hair, “If you liked me, why didn’t you ever say anything?” 

“I was trying to be respectful,” Don says, though that hardly captures the entirety of his hesitance. 

“Oh, Don,” Lily murmurs, “what are we going to do with you?” 

\- 

It’s late November when Akthar raps on Scripps’ door, poking his head in and saying, “Going down to the pub to meet some people. Pos mentioned he hadn’t seen you in a while, so I thought I would pop in, tell you to come along. Both of you,” he says, nodding at Lily with a friendly smile. 

“Oh, that sounds like fun,” Lily declares. “I want to spend time with your old school friends, Don. I haven’t really gotten to talk to any of them.” She tilts her head sideways. “Well, except for Stu, but, erm.” She trails off indecisively and Don can’t help but smile. 

Akthar grins, too. “I like her,” he declares, sticking his hands in his pockets. “She’s definitely welcome.” 

“Was I not actually before?” Lily asks. 

Akthar grins and shrugs, not at all sorry. “I’d say we’re a selective crowd but really we’re just keen on cutting wits, if you will.” 

“Are you now?” Don asks sardonically. “How high the bar has risen.” 

Akthar slinks out of the door. “Coming then?” 

“Of course we are. Anyhow, I’m hilarious,” Lily declares. 

When the three of them get to the pub, Beatrice, Posner and a handful of others have already commandeered a table and are recounting some lecture that’d been given at the Union. Duncan who loves pie is notably absent. 

“Oh, I saw that lecture,” Lily enthuses. “He was a brilliant speaker, wasn’t he?” 

At some point along the line, because they are Oxford men and women, the talk turns to classes. 

“It’s strange, how much we were just never told about,” Posner muses, from further down the table. He looks better, at least, for given definitions of better. 

“How d’you mean? Foucault again?” Don asks, only half mindful of the conversation, all too aware of his arm around Lily’s shoulders. 

“Yes,” Pos insists, “that, but I meant other things.” 

“Ah, empire,” Akthar drawls. “Pos has discovered his latent generational guilt about having been born and brought up in a land of colonists.” 

“Veni, vidi, vici,” Beatrice says, doing her best Churchill impression. 

“And left a mess,” Akthar drawls. “It is the proud, British way.” 

“Sorry for the imperialism, better luck next time, chaps,” Layla says, in a hard, mocking voice. 

“I know,” Posner says, mournfully. “I don’t think I ever actually realized how dismissive we were. And there’s so many people we never read.” 

“Still obsessing over Neruda?” Akthar asks. 

Layla cuts in, softer now, but still with conviction, “I think that’s perfectly understandable. His poetry - it’s like you can physically feel it, isn’t it?” She breathes in deeply, one hand curling almost into a fist in front of her chest. “Got something prepared in that giant brain of yours, David?” 

Posner straightens his spine and nods. 

“ _I don't love you as if you were a rose of salt, topaz,_ ” Posner recites, “ _or arrow of carnations that propagate fire: / I love you as one loves certain obscure things, / secretly, between the shadow and the soul._ ”6

As he speaks, he lifts his eyelids, focused on the near distance, the horizon, as if he’s not quite seeing any of them at all. 

Lily sits up, half-smiling, dreamily. “That’s lovely.” 

Don, personally, thinks lovely isn’t the correct adjective. Astonishing might be more appropriate, awesome in its most Biblical sense. 

“Anyway,” Posner says, deflating slightly, spine curving back into a slight slouch, “that’s what we’ve been missing, this whole time. Worlds of people speaking that we never listened to, that we barely even knew existed.” 

“Pos read him as part of his Post-Colonial History class,” Akthar says, pulling out a pack of cigarettes. (Scripps wonders, idly, when Akthar had started smoking; Scripps hadn’t noticed.) “Hasn’t stopped talking about him for days. He knocked on my door at half two in the morning saying he just _absolutely had to_ read me something.” Akthar elbows Posner, not unaffectionately. “Told him we probably never read the guy because he was a Communist. And God knows Felix hated it when we got ideas.” 

He pulls a cigarette to his mouth but Posner frowns and clicks his tongue in disapproval. 

“Adil, don’t. Your mum and dad’ll kill you.” 

Akthar lights up anyway, saying with a grin, “Not if they don’t know.” 

Pos huffs and slumps in his chair. 

Lily grins and says, “I think it’s sweet, you looking out for one another.” She rests a hand of Don’s knee and squeezes gently. 

Akthar smirks and says, “Sure. We’re sort of brothers-at-arms, after all. Like the Greeks. Athens though, not Sparta.” 

Posner must kick Akthar under the table because he recoils, a visual cue that pulls Scripps back into the conversation. 

Akthar mutters, “Fucking hell, you’d think you’d be better at football with that aim.” 

“Oh, fuck off,” Posner replies. “If you want to kill yourself slowly, you could at least do it where the smell won’t get into my clothes, too.” 

Scripps feels faintly troubled. 

Akthar rolls his eyes but stubs out his cigarette. “There,” he says, “satisfied?” 

Posner nods stiffly. 

The next afternoon, Scripps writes _Bit worried about Posner, though probably without need. It’s not that he seems lost - in fact, he seems to be dealing with everything rather better than expected. His dad must be better - he hasn’t said anything more. I could ask, I suppose, but I don’t think I’m nearly as prepared for bad news as I assumed I would be._

_He’s certainly handling the whole continued influx of new ideas better than most of us, but I’m not sure I know where the conviction’s headed. Not certain he does either. He says he wants to be an academic, though I can’t tell if it’s what he wants or if it’s what his favorite professor wants for him. Still, I suppose it is more direction than the purported average second-year university (funny to think it’s only been a year and a half) has, but I wonder about it. Professor Posner. Could work._

_Speaking about being lost, or potentially so: Lily. The undiscovered country, to use a metaphor I probably shouldn’t. Too reminiscent of Stu. And Hamlet. Neither of which one wants to emulate, in this situation._

_John Donne’s “new-found-land” is probably better, though it doesn’t have the same uncertainty, somehow._

About a month later, Scripps accidentally drowns that journal in tea and loses the rest of the entry. All things considered, it might be for the better, he thinks. He has the vague suspicion that at some point in the future, he may find all this terribly humiliating. 

\- 

He goes to visit Lily’s family for a weekend over the Christmas holidays. He sits up straight and smiles at the correct intervals and feels terribly uncomfortable the whole time, though her parents are appropriately welcoming and her younger sister is singularly incurious about him. 

“They were very polite,” Don reflects, when he gets back. He’s come with Posner to the music store they used to frequent, thinking to pick up some sheet music - Tchaikovsky, maybe, something with storytelling. “Extremely polite.” 

“Isn’t that a good thing?” Pos asks, absently, flipping through a stack of tapes. 

“I’ve no idea,” Don says. 

“Well, obviously, neither have I,” Posner says lightly. 

Don turns, arms crossed, and says, considering, “I’m not sure that is obvious, any more.” 

Posner raises his eyebrows. Don raises his back. 

“That tall Scotsman? Duncan, wasn’t it? He of the golden locks and the George Bernard Shaw?” 

Pos glances sideways and mutters, “Oh, honestly, Donald. That was hardly a ‘meeting the parents’ situation.” 

Don turns his laugh into a cough. Not very subtly. 

Posner purses his lips. “Are you waiting for some kind of confession? You won’t get one,” he says sourly. 

“So, you do have something to confess!” Don laughs, but feels a bit upended, even in the hilarity. Somehow he’d not at all expected this turn in the conversation, despite having been the one to initiate it. 

“Aren’t you supposed to be the discreet one?” Posner asks, tugging Don away from a browsing woman whose headphones are half-off. 

“Well, I’ve never known you to be, before,” Don says. “You’ve become withholding in your adulthood, Pos. What’s going on, then?” 

Posner sighs, impatient. “I’m not Dakin, you know. I have realized that things can have happened to me even without my sharing the details.” 

Don notes lightly, “I should think it would have to have been a shared experience by nature, though correct me if I’m wrong.” 

Posner clicks his tongue. “Yes. Alright, yes. It happened. We, well,” he flushes and makes an extremely vague hand gesture, “had sex. After everything with Dad and having to keep up with classes, I was rather in a state and he wanted to make me feel better.” 

“Make you feel better?” Don echoes, faintly incredulous. He’s blushing himself, some unnamable mixture of embarrassment and vaguely defined anger. 

Posner ignores him though, determinedly finishing his recounting of events, saying, “And it was . . . enjoyable.” 

“Enjoyable? That’s hardly the stuff of poetry,” Don says, feeling genuinely annoyed at Posner, though he knows he hasn’t any reason to be. “This story just keeps getting worse, Pos. Honestly, do you even like him?” 

“Well, when you put in that tone, of course it sounds bad!” Posner puts defiant hands on his hips. “Anyhow, it’s not even a story. If you’d just listen, you’d realize what I’m saying.” 

“And what are you saying?” Don asks. 

“Don,” Posner says, head tilted slightly sideway, tone ever so gentle, “of course I like him. It’s just that that’s all. But contrary to what we may have gleaned, not everyone actually needs a grand romance, I think.” He looks older, talking like this, slow and calm and reassuring, like he’s giving a lecture on some delicate piece of exegesis. “I know you’re happy and you want me to be happy, too, but I’m alright. Maybe it will happen, but not this time. And I’ve other things on my mind.” 

Don feels the flush on his face flood down the back of his neck as well, shame or embarrassment or sadness, he can’t quite gauge the combination. “I didn’t mean to be unfair.” 

Posner smiles, slightly. “I know,” he says. 

“It’s just that - what’s all the poetry for then?” Don asks, a bit unmoored. 

“Well,” Posner says, face becoming solemn and not just older, but an almost unearthly sort of ancient, “quite a lot of it is about death as well. I find that’s been more on my mind, of late.” 

“David,” Don says, wanting to reach out but unsure of his welcome. 

Posner shakes his head, like he’s hoping to clear away his thoughts. “I know I’ve been overreacting about what happened with Dad, but once mortality’s on the mind, it’s rather hard to shake. So I’ve been trying to prepare myself for the inevitable because it’s going to happen some time, but it’s proving quite difficult,” Posner says, aiming for darkly amusing but missing entirely. 

Posner turns away then, back to a stack of tapes and Scripps thinks of William Carlos Williams, a poet and doctor both, and wishes for same insight. 

\- 

Time seems to move more quickly, when they get back for the new term. 

Halfway through, Dakin comes by, saying, “Mate, where’ve you been? Got yourself a girl and now you’ve all but disappeared.” 

“I wouldn’t talk about her like that in her presence. She’s likely to hit you,” Scripps replies, capping his pen. 

Dakin winces. “Yes, I noticed. I question your taste, Scripps.” 

“Yes, do come in and insult my choices,” Scripps says dryly, turning away again. 

“Oh, don’t get huffy,” Dakin says. “I’m organizing a reunion of sorts. I phoned Jimmy the other day and we decided that he’s bringing the Cambridge lads down at the weekend, so I promised to scrounge up all of us here. So, are you free?” 

Don considers. He’s not been good at keeping up with old friends or even many new ones this term, too caught up in first love and the constant surprise of his tutorial papers. 

“Yeah, fine, that might be nice,” Don decides. “Look at you, getting sentimental.” 

“Hardly,” Dakin scoffs. “Jimmy’s the one who suggested it.” 

“Right,” Scripps says, smiling despite an honest attempt not to do so. “Well, while you’re here, I’m sure you’re dying to catch me up on your exploits. Take a seat, then.” 

“Or maybe you’re dying to hear about them,” Dakin leers. 

Scripps rolls his eyes. “Lived experience is not exactly a department I’m lacking in anymore. Just because I don’t go on about it to everyone I meet doesn’t mean I haven’t -” 

“Stormed the citadel?” Dakin offers.

“Really?” Scripps groans, crumpling up scrap paper and pelting Dakin with it. 

An hour and a half later, when Dakin goes to leave, Don asks, curious in a faintly melancholy way he can’t help but poke at, “Stu?” 

“Yeah?” 

“Are you happy here?” 

Dakin turns back to him from the half open door way and frowns at him. “What, at Oxford? Of course I am.” 

“Right,” Scripps agrees. “Of course.” 

-

“Yeah, brilliant, let’s have a Muslim, a slightly kosher Jew and a bunch of lightweight white boys congregate in an already crowded pub,” Crowther says, eternally unimpressed. “That’s a fantastic idea.”

“This hasn’t exactly been thought out well, has it,” Posner mutters, fiddling with a napkin, sounding younger than Scripps has heard in a while.

“Slightly kosher?” asks Lockwood. “Can you be slightly kosher? Is that how it works?”

“You can when you’re from Sheffield,” Posner says drily. “I avoid bacon and over the holidays, I take as much free food as possible from the Jewish Community Center here. The rabbi back home’s terribly proud.”

“Have you ever eaten bacon?” Lockwood asks Akthar.

“No.”

“Neither of you?” Timms asks. “That’s a tragedy!”

“You would say that,” Akthar responds.

“Well, excuse you!”

“What? I was talking about the sophistication of your palate.”

“Oh, yeah, course you were!”

Scripps rests his head against the wall and watches, inside and outside at once. Documenting, participating. Maybe, he thinks idly, he ought to have been an anthropologist, instead. But no, he would have hated that, the attempt to find human nature in the way people eat and dress - he’s better at observation than interpretation, really. 

Dakin catches his eye and grins broadly. Rudge, in the corner, his head resting on his fist, looks slightly bored but also a little bit amused.

In the end, they go to one pub and have exactly two and a half rounds of drinks, during which time Churchill, Wordsworth and the Ewoks from _The Return of the Jedi_ are all discussed, before the attempts to beg off begin. 

“Well,” Posner says, “this has been sufficiently and uncomfortably nostalgic, but I’m getting paid to help people with their abysmal Hebrew reading skills tomorrow morning, so I should be off.”

“Headed the same way, obviously,” Akthar shrugs. “If you feel like it, we can head out, now, Chris. Gives us time to scrounge up some extra bedding for you.”

“Oh, come on, Pos,” Lockwood says, throwing an arm over Posner’s shoulders, “you can’t go abandoning us already, when we’ve come all this way.”

“Across such a vast distance,” Timms adds, all faux-melancholy. 

Crowther merely rolls his eyes. 

“Come on, Akthar, Posner,” Dakin says, “stay a while. Or don’t you like us anymore?”

“I don’t get paid to like you,” Posner says.

“Otherwise you’d be rich,” Lockwood interjects. Scripps thinks, idly, that if Lockwood had seen more of David recently he wouldn’t have been quite so eager to assert that.

“I do get paid to, at a minimum, not show up to my own sessions hung-over,” Posner continues, as if he hasn’t heard.

“Whereas I may just never have liked you all to begin with,” Akthar says with a smile.

Crowther lifts his pint glass in a toast towards Akthar.

“Lies,” jeers Timms, “awful lies.”

“Abandoning the ties of scholarly brotherhood for mere monetary compensation?” laments Lockwood. “What would our forefathers say?”

“Well, yours would probably say mine would be proud,” Posner answers tartly.

Rudge sniggers. 

“What?” he asks. “He’s got you there, a bit.” 

“Thank you, Peter,” Posner says. 

And finally, Scripps decides he ought to intervene before the petty squabbling becomes any more heated. “At the risk of sounding dull -” Then he patiently waits out the multiple variations on “Aren’t you always?” 

“At the risk of sounding dull,” Scripps begins again, “might I suggest we move this to my college? I realized yesterday I still have your copy of _Howard’s End_ ,” he tells Posner, “that I borrowed over Christmas.”

“I’ve been looking for that!” Posner says. 

“Why don’t you all come, and I can give it back, while the rest of you wreck havoc?” Scripps offers. 

After some debate and cajoling, it’s agreed upon.

“How old we have grown and how responsible,” Lockwood muses, as he collapses onto Scripps’ bed.

“Should have brought my camera,” Akthar says, closing the door and then leaning up against it, contemplating the scene. 

“Photographic evidence that we all have survived,” Lockwood says. “So far, anyway.”

“Barely, in some cases,” Timms adds lightly. 

There’s an unshared story behind the comment, Scripps is sure, but before he can ask, Dakin speaks. 

“All photographs are momento mori,” Dakin says, from where he’s perched on Scripps’ desk, staring out into the middle distance like some old film hero.7 “Or so Susan Sontag says anyway.”

There is a silence. Don clears his throat. Dakin’s not known for his tendency to reflect on the past; there’s something shark-like in him.

“Didn’t know you’d gotten interested in photography, Stu,” Akthar says. 

Dakin looks back and says, “Oh, I haven’t, really. But my tutor’s quite the fan.” There’s something in his smile Don can’t quite name or that he might just not want to name. (The last thing Don needs to consider is whether he ought to warn Dakin off sleeping with his tutor, especially since if Dakin’s decided to, he’s likely already accomplished it.)

Things die down, in the early hours of the morning. Dakin and Lockwood are the last to leave.

“It was good to see you,” Don tells Lockwood.

“Nice, wasn’t it?” Jimmy agrees, hands in his pockets. “Bit weird, don’t you think, that we don’t all see more of each other? Not like we’re so far apart.”

Dakin shrugs. “It’s not that strange,” he says. 

Don looks at him and he supposes he must look rather accusatory because Dakin then says defensively, “I just mean no one expects us to be the same, surely.”

Lockwood grins and shakes his head. “Freud would have had fun with you, Stu,” he says. 

“And on that thought, do get out of my room,” Scripps says. 

-

“Can you believe we’ve only got one more year after this?” asks Nate, very clearly not doing his revising at all.

“Let’s not talk about that, shall we?” Lily groans. 

“Mmm, seconded,” Don says, rubbing at his temple. “I’ve only just got enough room in my mind to think about my exams. I can’t possibly contemplate the future right now.”

“Right, motion passed then. Do be quiet, Nathaniel,” Lily says, with judgmental frown from over the top of the glasses she rarely wears. 

“I’m only saying we can’t ignore it all the time. It’s the truth,” Nate grumbles. “Reality is imminent and we’ve got to face it.”

“Yes, but not today,” Lily says firmly. 

-

It’s May and when he almost literally bumps into Posner on his bike, passing through Radcliffe Square, it’s a bit like waking up for the first time in weeks. 

“Christ, I need to sleep more,” Scripps says. “Or pray more. One of the two.”

“Dear Lord, please protect me from bicyclists and my own inability to look where I’m going,” Posner quips as he dismounts, looking rather exhausted himself.

“Amen,” Scripps agrees.

“Well,” Posner says, “only a few more weeks.”

“Yeah,” Don agrees, though it’s hard to imagine at the moment. 

“Speaking of,” Posner says, pulling a hand through his surprisingly shaggy hair. “D’you know where you’ll be living or who with, in the fall?”

“Yeah, splitting a flat with Nate. Dakin asked, but I declined for a variety of reasons.”

Posner nods absently.

“Sorry, I would’ve asked, if I’d known you were looking,” Don added.

Posner shakes his head. “No, I was only curious. I’m set, actually. Layla and Beatrice were looking for a third flatmate.”

“Layla’s parents don’t mind?” Don asked. Layla’s at St. Hilda’s, one of the all women’s colleges, to make her parents feel more secure, Akthar’d once said. 

“I’ve been deemed harmless enough, for whatever reason,” Posner says.

“Can’t imagine why,” Scripps replies. 

“Yes, very mysterious,” Posner agrees, with a sardonic arch of his eyebrows. 

“Speaking of mysteries, I’ve been meaning to ask - what are you doing this summer?”

“Oh,” Posner says, nodding, “I’m going to Greece. Dad’s doing well enough at the moment and so am I, it would seem, so I’ve decided to go after all.” 

“Greece?” Don repeats, blinking.

“Yes, didn’t I tell you?” David asks, frowning.

“No,” Don says. “I think I would have remembered that.”

“Oh. Well. I’m going to Greece this summer,” David says. “With this group Professor Arlow’s bringing. He’s working on a project about the preservation of historical sites. I applied months ago.”

“Wow.” Don feels somewhat disoriented.

Posner adjusts his grip on his bike handles. “Well, you’re going to to that writing fellowship in New York, of all places. It’s not like you’re doing nothing.”

“Yes, but - but also I told you about that.”

“I think I first heard it from Beatrice, actually.”

“Sorry, are we having some kind of argument?” Don asks, frowning. He hasn’t had a full grasp on its conversation from the moment it began. 

David sighs. “No, Don, we’re not. It’s the end of term and I’m worried and I’ve got all this paperwork to sort out before I leave, but I’m not angry. At least not at you.”

“Yeah. Well, look at us. New York, Greece. Bit of a step up from Sheffield, isn’t it?” Don comments, holding back all the questions he has. Has he really been so caught up that he didn’t know this was happening?

David nods, wearing a small, tired smile. “Just a bit, I’d say.”

“Well,” Don says, “try not to fall under the spell of any gods of misrule, I suppose.”

David smiles. “I don’t really think I’m in much danger of that. The Bacchae were all women, after all.” He pauses and then continues, softly, “I just feel like I’ve got to go now, you know. Before it’s too late.” 

“Too late for what, Pos?” Scripps asks, concerned.

“Oh - just timing,” Posner says, directed at a cobblestone. “I don’t want to be weighing regrets against each other for the rest of my life.”

Don blinks. “I want to make some sort of literary allusion here, but I’m too exhausted to think of an appropriate one,” he says. “I think university’s dulled me in certain ways.”

Posner smiles slightly and looks back up.

And that gives Don the wherewithal to continue, “So, I’ll just ask: are you quite alright, David?”

Posner tips his head sideways and bites his lip. “I think so,” he says. “I’m just -” he sighs deeply. “I’m just tired, is all. I think it’ll do me good, not to be in Oxford. Not be at home. Dad’s doing well enough and I don’t know when the next I’ll be able to say that is, so going now’s probably for the best.”

Don nods. “Well,” he says, at a bit of a loss, “you’ll have to write me. We’ll test out how well air mail works these days.”

Posner nods, gentle, slightly wind-blown, an image that belongs in a portrait gallery. “Of course we will,” he says.

Scripps is almost certain Posner doesn’t believe that promise.

-

New York is - New York is.

Don reads Edith Wharton on graffitied subway cars and Walt Whitman in Chinatown. He scribbles notes in the margins of his second hand copy of Langston Hughes while he sits in Riverside Park and plays tapes of Simon and Garfunkel when he walks down Broadway. 

He writes. He writes in class and he writes in his room, in the heavy, humid, oppressive heat that hangs over the city, which is only interrupted, at unpredictable intervals, by violent thunderstorms that appear and disappear like wild animals.

Some days he misses home so much he feels almost physically sick. Some days he cannot imagine ever going home again.

He writes letters, fantasizing vaguely about how scholars generations later may collect them - _The Correspondence of Donald A. Scripps_ \- and then laughs at the absurdity of himself. 

He calls home about once a week, wishing his mother would stop shouting down the phone line as if she doesn’t trust the wires to get her voice across the Atlantic - _it’s not the fifties, Mum, the phone works just fine_ \- even if he understands the urge. 

There are days when he misses Lily fiercely, imagines her alongside him as he ducks into Chelsea art galleries, more for the cool air than the work. 

And there are other days, when he thinks to himself, _oh, Pos would think that was funny_ or _Nate would like this_ or _Beatrice would be able to tell him exactly how stupid that thought was_ or something else, and he finds himself surprised again, that he is here alone, thousands of miles away from everyone who knows him best. 

He flies back into London in late August, feeling like a photograph with double exposure - an image of who he is here in his homeland superimposed on the image of who he has been elsewhere.

 _I haven’t exactly been Alexis de Tocqueville or Auden in my American explorations, but it is strange to be going to home_ , he jots on the train north. _Maybe I can get Pos to learn “The Boxer” with me when we get back. Though I suppose that was written as a duet and I haven’t really done any singing since school. A somewhat troubling thought, that._

-

Don sees Posner for the first time in months at the Sainsbury’s, of all places, about two weeks before they have to head back to Oxford. 

“Hi, stranger,” he says. “Brought me back anything from the land of classical antiquity?”

Posner turns around from where he had been contemplating egg cartons and laughs. It occurs to Don that he hasn’t seen Posner laugh in months, even disregarding the time they’ve just spent on separate continents. 

Posner looks older behind his now familiar glasses, and his hair might be a few shades lighter than usual, from prolonged exposure to the Grecian sun, but his shoulders seem less hunched. 

“I don’t know, did you bring me back anything from New York?” Posner asks, still smiling.

“Tried to convince the cast of _A Chorus Line_ to come back with me, but for some reason they didn’t seem interested.”

“They didn’t want to come to Sheffield? Shocking.”

“Terribly small-minded,” Don agrees with a grin. “But really, how’ve you been?”

“Good, actually,” Posner says, with conviction. “You?”

“Yeah, same, really good,” Don says. He smiles and suddenly home doesn’t feel quite so disjointed and strange any longer.

-

They see more of each other that fall than has been typical at Oxford. Perhaps because it’s their last year and that’s singularly terrifying. 

“You didn’t write me enough over the summer,” Scripps says, bumping his shoulder against Posner’s. They’re sitting on a bench in the Oxford Botanic Gardens with pile of books each, vague plans to study dissipating in favor of sitting and soaking in last of the fall sunshine. 

“And you didn’t write me enough,” Posner rebuts without any vehemence. 

“I missed you,” Scripps confesses. It’s true. He hadn’t even quite realized how much until he’d seen Posner again. 

“Yes, I know,” Posner says, lightly. “I am the sort of person one misses.” 

Scripps snorts and kicks Posner’s ankle. 

They don’t end up getting much reading done but for once neither of them quite cares.

“I’ll regret having wasted all this time tomorrow,” Posner says, letting his volume on Kamal Ataturk and his reforms lie unopened on his lap. “I’ll be angry at myself.”

“Yeah,” Scripps agrees, “but the weather’s so beautiful.”

“ _A thing of beauty is a joy forever: / Its loveliness increases, it will never / Pass into nothingness_ ,” Posner recites.8

Scripps nods, closing his eyes. “And that’s exactly what I’ll say to my tutor when he asks why I haven’t written my essay,” he says, smiling.

Posner snorts inelegantly. “Yes,” he says, “I imagine that’ll go over extraordinarily well. You know you’re only going to be up late tonight, writing it anyway.”

“Maybe not. Some of aren’t quite so obsessive about our grades,” Scripps replies.

“Well, some of us are going to get a first,” Posner returns, sing-song. 

“You’re being very irritating,” Scripps says, drowsy in the sunlight.

“I’m a paragon of virtues, thanks,” Posner replies. 

There are birds in the trees, chirping excitedly, as if they too, are taking advantage of the unseasonably lovely weather. 

“ _Now I will do nothing but listen, / To accrue what I hear into this song, to let sounds contribute towards it,_ ” Scripps murmurs, half to himself.9

“Is that Whitman?” Posner asks. 

“Yeah,” Scripps agrees. He wonders whether it would be charming or just stupid to take a nap on the bench.

“Still in an American frame of mind, then?” Posner asks, poking Don and forcing him to open his eyes.

“Or it might be my eloquent way of asking you to be quiet,” Scripps offers. 

Posner narrows his eyes. “No, I know this section. Isn’t there - hold on.” He frowns for a moment and Scripps can almost see Posner’s mind flipping through half-remembered verse.

“Yes?” Scripps asks, a bit goading. 

“ _I hear the sound I love, the sound of the human voice_ ,” Posner returns, triumphantly. “Or something close to that, anyhow. You may be listening, but I may speak as much as I want. Old Walt would probably encourage me. Youth and liberty and choice and all that.”

“As if I could actually stop you from talking either way,” Scripps says. 

“True,” Posner agrees. “I never really read Whitman until last year. You know, the rabbi back home gave me a copy of _Leaves of Grass_ before I came up?”

“Did he really?”

“Yeah,” Posner says, smiling a bit perplexedly. “Said he had ‘fond memories’ of reading it when he was at university. He’s new-ish. And young. He only started a few months before our A-Levels. I’m the first congregant he’s sent off to Oxford. I suppose he was pleased about it. Though I imagine it helped that I didn’t disclose the particulars what I said in my essays or my interview.”

“Whitman doesn’t strike one as an obvious gift from a rabbi,” Don offers.

“He’s a bit of an odd one. He gave me Yehuda Amichai, as well, to fulfill the Jewish side of my education I suppose. Although Amichai’s basically a secular Socialist, so I’ve not quite figured out the implications of that, either,” Posner says, contemplatively, tracing a pattern on the cover of his biography of Ataturk. 

“And is the secular Socialist a good poet?” Scripps asks.

Posner nods. “Oh, yes. Ted Hughes likes him quite a lot, apparently. Hold on, I’ve got my copy, actually.”

Scripps raises his eyebrows slightly in amusement. 

Posner clicks his tongue. “I’m writing an essay on the British excavations of the Temple Mount. I thought there might be something I could use as an epigraph or something. Found it,” he says, pulling out a volume from his bag. He flips through it, eyebrows drawn together. “Oh, here’s something appropriate. I’ll just do the first bit?”

“Go on,” Scripps says, sitting up on the bench now.

“ _I passed by the school where I studied as a boy,_ ” Posner reads, “ _and said in my heart: here I learned certain things / and didn’t learn others. All my life I have loved in vain / the things I didn’t learn._ ”10 He stops there. It takes several seconds before he looks up at Scripps again. “There’s more. It’s about childhood and first love and memory, but the first lines are so striking.”

Scripps nods. “When you’ve found your epigraph, will you lend me the book?” he asks.

“Of course,” Posner promises. He smiles and there’s something odd about the expression on his face, as if he’s about to confess something. But then he looks down and notices his watch and only says, “Dear God, when did it get so late in the day?” 

-

“I just don’t understand,” moans Pos’s friend, Thea, dragging her hands through her thick, curly black hair. “I can’t do this.”

“It’s fine,” Posner says soothingly. “Do something else for a while.”

“What are you working on?” Don asks.

“Essay on Kant,” Thea says. “Or I’m meant to be, if I ever figure out what the fuck he’s saying.”

“Afraid I can’t be of much help. What I did understand of him made me stop going to church,” Don confesses.

“Kant made you stop going to church?” Posner asks, raising his eyebrows. 

“Well, probably Dr. Walters, actually. He was going to go to seminary, only he didn’t and he was explaining why - we were reading Kant, see - and I could feel this deflation. In my mind.”

“You never told me,” Posner says, frowning.

“I had this suspicion sharing my crisis of faith wasn’t going to make me feel better,” Don says dryly. “It’s a bit ridiculous, really. Years of reading skeptics and deists and Emerson telling me to go out into nature and yet it’s my professor talking about almost going to seminary that ends that particular saintly streak.”

Posner looks troubled. “I don’t really think Kant intended to put people off God. I’m fairly certain.”

Thea rubs her temple. “How can you even tell?” she asks. “I can barely even figure out where one sentence ends and another starts, and forget about the bloody footnotes.”

“I didn’t actually say God,” Scripps says. “I think I still believe in God but I don’t know how I feel about the Church at the moment. I suppose it’s just something I’d prefer not to touch right now. Means I’ve got loads more free time, anyhow.”

“Rambam - Maimonides - says we can only ever really know God by knowing what God is not,” Posner says, slowly.11

“What class are you reading Maimonides for?” asks Thea.

“Wasn’t for class, actually,” Posner says. 

“Jesus,” Thea mutters. She looks back down again, to her books and pad of paper. 

“Well, not really,” Posner grins.

“Well, maybe he’s onto something, because as of right now I’m not sure I really know anything about God,” Scripps says. (Lily’s an atheist and aesthete and Don is tired of searching for signs and clarity.) “But I’m a bit more concerned about getting this essay done.”

“Right,” Posner murmurs. 

-

The rest of the term goes far too fast - they’re coming up on Christmas quite suddenly. Scripps wonders what is about time that means it always seems to speed up right before an ending. 

Lily bites her nails a lot, now. 

“I’ve got to stop, I know,” she says. “But it’s only that I’ve no plans and there’s nothing more frightening than uncertainty.”

Lily worked for a finance firm in London last summer. She could go back, has an offer on the table she isn’t sure she wants to accept, but by now Don knows not to mention that. She might want to do postgraduate studies, but is (understandably) ambivalent about the terminally uphill slog of being an academic woman mathematician. In the worst parts of himself, Don is jealous of her freedom to remain undecided. 

Don has started sending out his CV almost indiscriminately.

Posner sees one of his letters, to be sent to a local London paper, and asks, “Have you ever actually read this paper?”

Don glances at the name. “Maybe. Dunno. I’m not sure it matters at this point,” he says, pulling his hand through hair. “Fucking hell, listen to me. I would have never said something like that when we were at school.”

“You might have, however unenthusiastically,” David says. “It was sort of the way we acted: we’d have said anything if it got us here. I would’ve anyway.”

“Is that meant to make me feel better?” Don asks. 

David shrugs. “It’s not a judgment. We’re allowed to change.”

“Yes, but I didn’t want that to change,” Don says. “Maybe I should start going to services again. It’s not like there’s a dearth of churches or chapels around here. You think I’d have read Schleiermacher and felt closer to God.”

“I don’t know who that is,” David says. “Schleiermacher, not God.”

“I guessed,” Don grins. “Nineteenth century theologian of liberal Christianity. I thought I’d look for my faith again. Or attempt to anyway. You inspired me a bit, talking about Maimonides.”

Posner shrugs. “Maybe you just need to wait. Perhaps God will come to you.”

“Yes, well, it’s easy for you to say that,” Don says, pulling his hand through his hair, “because you don’t really - ”

“Believe in God?” Posner cuts in. “I do, though, you know that. Enough anyway. I don’t believe in a literal burning bush and if the covenant ever existed, it doesn’t appear to have done us any favors. But I think there might be a God. I know it’s not the same for you, but I think sometimes faith works best when you leave it alone.”

“Is that satisfying, though? Is it enough?” Don asks. 

“I don’t know. We are different,” Posner says slowly. “But I suppose - d’you remember that bit - it’s in Leviticus, I think, of all things, about sabbath years and jubilee years? Where we’ve got to forgive each other’s debts and let the earth rest?”12

Don nods slowly. “Sort of, yeah.”

“I suppose I just think about that. I don’t think God cares that much how often you go to church, but even if He did, what’s the point in telling us to forgive each other and to heal the earth if He doesn’t believe in forgiveness and starting over?”

“Imagine what the world would be like if all theologians thought like you,” Don says. 

“More haphazard,” Posner replies. “Anyway, forget your Christians. If you really want to wrestle with the incomprehensible nature of God, you ought pick up the medieval rabbis. It’s all about interpretation and the struggle of figuring out what God expects of you, etcetra, etcetra. ”

“Has Maimonides really been that helpful for you?”

“Perhaps,” Posner says. “The results aren’t in yet. I was looking to be reassured and I don’t know if that’s happened, but some of it fits, you know?”

Don looks at his desk. He can’t help but wonder what’s gotten Posner on his current theology kick but isn’t entirely certain he wants to know. 

“Yeah. Can we talk about something else?” Don asks, scratching the back of his neck.

“If you’d like,” Posner says and shrugs. “So you’re set on London, then?” he asks.

‘Set on’ seems to imply too much active decision on Don’s part - London is where most everyone he knows is looking and he doesn’t want to head back to Sheffield. To go now, just after Oxford, would somehow be to admit defeat, to concede that the years he has spent walking amongst its spires have not reshaped him into someone enviable (though of course, he’s fairly certain they haven’t in most ways, despite teaching him to play corquet properly, a skill he’s fairly certain he’ll never utilize again, once he leaves). 

“Yeah, I suppose,” Don says, feeling the urge to scratch the back of his neck. “Have you thought about whether you’re going to send in your postgraduate school applications this winter?”

“Probably I will, because they’re mostly prepared, but I do worry about being away from my father,” David says, looking somewhere to the side of where Don actually is. 

“And your dad? What does he say?” Don asks.

“Haven’t really talked to him about it. Part of the problem is that he doesn’t want me to come home,” Posner says, inspecting his nails. 

“I’m sure it’s just that he wants you to be able to do what you want,” Scripps replies. It’s hard to offer advice. His parents are quietly proud, bemused, and healthy. He’s being a bad son, perhaps, but he hasn’t had to think of them, in deciding where next to go from Oxford’s hallowed halls.

“Oh, it’s obviously that,” Posner says. “That’s why he feels guilty. He feels guilty for for being old and sick and inconveniencing me, can you imagine?”

“Oh, Pos,” Don murmurs. 

Posner scratches at his wrist. Don grabs his hand and eases it back down. He feels a bit odd about it - too intimate, really - but they’ve known each other so long the boundaries are blurred.

Pos makes one of those odd little faces only he can, somehow expressing both gratitude and faint annoyance at once. 

He pulls away. Slowly, though. Gently. “It’s alright, Don. I’ll be fine,” he says.

Faced with circumstances not nearly as daunting, Don only wishes he could have the same conviction about himself.

-

Lily and he don’t really fight, perhaps argue a bit, disagree about some point of philosophy, but they don’t fight, so when it comes, a few weeks after they get back from the Christmas holidays, it’s somehow unexpected, even though it’s not really.

“I’ve decided to to take the spot at the firm,” Lily says, pouring milk into her tea. 

Don means to nod, but in his mind, he suddenly sees his own future spooling out in front of him: a slightly shabby Northern journalist (of all things), who writes largely uninteresting and often inconsequential news pieces and talks, at dinner parties and over cocktails, about the novel he’s working on, that he’s going to finish, any day now. 

_Then what was all the poetry for?_ he wonders. _Consolation, after all?_

“So passing on the sanctity of theoretical mathematics for the moment, then?” Scripps asks. He knows he should not have said it, but he has now, an unfortunate tactic meant more to fight off his own sense of purposelessness than to be insulting, though it is of course the latter as well.

“You don’t have to be snide about it,” Lily replies. 

“I didn’t mean to be,” Don protests half-heartedly.

“You’re not the only one who has things to prove,” Lily says. “It really isn’t your place to pass judgment.”

The situation grows rather worse, after that. Though they tend to avoid confrontation, in this instance, they seem to find unexpected reserves of until now unvoiced complaints. 

-

“I may have fucked up,” Don says, sitting on the floor of Akthar’s room, peeling the label off the beer he’s drinking. (He knows better, of course, than to turn to Dakin, who would probably be sympathetic but encourage him to do things he’d regret later. And Nate knew Lily first and now they live together, which is uncomfortable, at the moment.)

Posner winces but says, “You can still apologize. It’s only the first time you’ve really fought. Which in itself is - notable.” He’s holding something back, always careful, when speaking about Don’s relationship with Lily, like he’s investigating a specimen in a lab and doesn’t want to taint the results.

Akthar offers, “Get her flowers. Works with Layla.”

Don turns to look at Posner for confirmation.

“Honestly,” Posner says, holding his hands up, “I don’t know why you’re both looking at me. What could I possibly have to add to this conversation?”

“No insight into the fairer sex, then?” Don asks wryly.

“Unless you count reading Simone de Beauvoir.”

“I suppose it depends on whether you understood her,” Scripps muses.

“I don’t know if I understand anything,” Posner says. “I sometimes feel that I’m just pretending comprehension all the time, hoping no one will notice it’s all bluffing. Presumably I’m not getting stupider, but it feels like I’m never even going to catch sight of the end line.”

“Fuck’s sake,” Akthar says, sliding down further onto his bed. “I can’t handle both of you having an existential crisis at the same time.”

“Well,” Posner says contemplatively, “his isn’t really an existential crisis, is it?”

“Cheers, thanks,” Scripps says from the floor. 

Posner grins at him from the swivel chair. “Anyway,” he adds, “neither is mine. I’ll get over it,” he says sourly, smile dropping away entirely. “Be such a waste if I stopped now.”

“But if you don’t like it - scholarship or whatnot,” Scripps says, feeling rather sour himself, “why not just stop?”

“It’s what I’m good at, isn’t it? School,” Posner says. 

Scripps looks away, back down to the bottle he’s cradling. He hears Akthar shift around again, pushing his blanket further off the bed.

Posner sighs. “I don’t dislike it, Don. I do want to keep going. It is what I - enjoy, I suppose. But don’t you understand, how disconcerting it is to realize there’s no end? That I’ll just keep going and there’s no actual destination to arrive at?”

That is a sensation Don has become quite familiar with, recently.

But Posner’s still talking, saying, “I mean, imagine I end up a senior lecturer somewhere, in the future - it’s not like I can just sit around and congratulate myself. Picturing that - it’s exhausting.”

“Probably could if you were famous,” Akthar offers, not really trying to solve a problem that’s not his to solve anyway. “Just a thought.”

“Yes,” Posner agrees. “Or maybe if I were rich.”

“Oh, brilliant,” Scripps says, “we’ve found the answer. Let’s all become millionaires.”

“Well, that wouldn’t solve your problem,” Posner says. “Not really, in the long run. What about tulips? People like tulips, don’t they?”

Akthar shrugs. “Or write her a poem. A love letter, that’s up your alley, isn’t it?”

“But what if I didn’t?” Scripps asks. “What if I just - did nothing? What if I didn’t apologize?”

Akthar and Posner share a look. 

“Do you not want to apologize?” Akthar asks, sitting up again.

“I’m not sure that would go the way you want,” Posner says, a little tense, a little curled in on himself. 

“I’m not sure I know what I want, actually,” Don confesses, out loud, at last.

“So it is an existential crisis, then,” Akthar says. “Fucking brilliant.” 

“It’s just - right, all this poetry about being in love and I’m just sure I feel that - I mean, I’m just not sure it’s as . . . easy - or not easy, but it’s not as free of the mundane or the petty as I expected,” Don says. It’s an admission he’s been avoiding making, even to himself. “I didn’t expect it to be difficult in quite this way. If this is love, shouldn’t that somehow preclude my being jealous of her? Y’know, ‘love is patient, love is kind’?”13

Posner laughs suddenly. Don’s offended, despite his best efforts. 

“Sorry, Scrippsy,” David says, looking genuinely contrite. “That was inappropriate. I just suddenly had this vision, as if it were an exam question: What is love? You may refer to literature and historical events. Please write legibly.” 

“Are you already drunk?” Akthar asks, with affectionate amusement. “You total lightweight.” 

“Yes, well, I’d like to know the answer,” Don says. “Despite everything, I don’t feel I actually understand. I expected to lose God at university. That I might also lose track of what love is never occurred to me.”

Akthar sighs. 

Posner is quiet, frowning slightly.

“I don’t think you’re being quite fair,” he says. He pauses again. “ _You pierce my soul,_ ” he murmurs, to his intertwined hands. “ _I am half agony, half hope._ ”14

He’s quoting - a novel, a love letter, but Scripps can’t place what exactly. 

“Neither of you?” Posner asks, looking up, rather disapproving, after several moments of silence. “It’s Jane Austen.”

“ _Persuasion_ ,” Scripps says triumphantly. 

Posner nods. 

Akthar shrugs. “Never actually read that one,” he admits. 

“It is a good love letter,” Scripps says. Angling his head towards Posner, he asks, “So that’s what love is, then, in your definition?”

Posner tips his head sideways. “Well, I’m not certain. It’s been mostly agony on my part, hasn’t it? But yes. I hope so.”

Scripps sighs. “This isn’t exactly how I was imagining romance to go,” he says. “I spend more than a year pining over someone just to wonder whether it was ever really love?”

“It happens,” Posner says, with a sympathetic smile. 

“Thought you said you weren’t ever in love with Dakin,” Scripps protests.

“I don’t think I really was,” Posner says. “I think I was infatuated with the idea of him, more than anything. But Lily’s nice. I thought things were going well.”

“I think they were, mostly. Or if not well, then at least placidly, although whether that’s a virtue is evidently debatable. Anyhow, she thinks I’m judging her for taking the position at the finance firm.”

“Aren’t you?” Akthar asks.

“But not out of willful intent. It’s more that I envy the opportunities she can take for granted,” Scripps says to ceiling. 

“Because she’s got money?” Akthar asks.

“And applicable talents. Though that all makes me sound sort of vulgar, like I’m Eliza Doolittle’s father,” Scripps mutters. “I do recognize that I’m being unfair, because she’s had to deal with more than her share of wankers.”

“We all pinned so much on going to Oxford, didn’t we?” Posner says, quietly thoughtfully. “And it does feel as if we’ve gotten to the point where we can - well, I can anyway - feel doors closing. Potentialities that are no longer possibilities. After three years at Oxford, I know a fair amount about a limited number of subjects, none which have obvious utility. It might have been what I wanted, but there is something dissatisfying in knowing I’ll never have to opportunity to decide whether to take some extremely lucrative position.”

This, Scripps thinks, does a fair, if incomplete, job at grasping Don’s strange, tangled, prickly and ungenerous emotions about the whole thing. 

“I wonder, would it really be selling out if you haven’t got anything to sell in the first place?” Akthar asks. 

“There is my soul,” Posner replies.

“Or your body,” Scripps says. He is a bit more drunk than he realized. 

Posner nods. “Yes, prostitution. Why didn’t I think of that? Won’t that be a good use of my Oxford education.”

Scripps snorts and Akthar laughs. 

“You’d think after all this time, our senses of humor would have improved,” Akthar says.

Posner laughs. “And we’re still terrible at advice, apparently. Poor Scrippsy. All we’ve done is complain about ourselves and get you horribly drunk. We’re not helping you at all, are we?”

“You’re the one complaining, Pos,” Akthar says, more lazy than tart. 

Scripps shrugs. “I’m not horribly drunk. And I don’t know. You might be helping. I suppose we’ll see in the morning.” 

-

“I am sorry,” Scripps says, not the next day but the day after at least, to Lily. 

“So am I,” Lily says, slowly, hesitantly. “I wasn’t very nice.”

“Neither was I,” Don says, which is only the truth. 

Lily bites her lip. “Don, I think perhaps we ought to talk. About what it is we expect from one another.”

Despite his drunken misapprehensions about their relationship, Don can’t help but feel this rather alarming. 

“That sounds a bit dire,” Don says. “Isn’t normal to argue?”

Lily looks somewhere off to the side of Don’s left ear. “But we don’t. We don’t argue,” she says. “Haven’t you ever thought that a bit odd?”

“We tend to agree on things, is all,” Don answers, though he knows Lily’s not incorrect. Even when they get takeaway, one of them generally decides while the other waves an assent, buried in assignments. 

“I think we agree until we don’t and then we pretend we agree until we can’t,” Lily says, slowly, measured. “It makes things comfortable but it’s not very smart, for two clever people.”

“I love you,” Don says, because it needs to be said.

“I love you, too, Don,” Lily says. “But I don’t think this was meant to last. I suppose I tried to say so, at the beginning, only we both lost sight of that. But we’ll be finished with university soon and then what?”

Don is a bit blank. “I hadn’t really thought about it,” he says. This seems, upon reflection, rather a large oversight. “You’ll go to London, I suppose.”

“And what about you?” Lily asks. “I’m not talking about work. I mean, what is it that you imagine yourself doing, in your life?”

“I want to write. A novel, hopefully, like I’ve said,” Don answers, quietly. The truth, finally, for once. “I wouldn’t mind living in London, for a few years, to have the experience at least. Spend the weekends in museums, or seeing plays. But I like to imagine I’ll go back North one day. Get a house. Possibly a cat. Go to the Peak District on holiday with my brother and sister, probably argue the entire time about directions. Have dinners with my parents.”

“That sounds like you,” Lily says, smiling tightly. 

“What do you want?” Don asks. 

“I want to go to London,” Lily begins, with warm, firm conviction. “I want to work in the City, to show people I can. And then when I’m older, I want to go back and do pure maths again, so little girls will see that women can do it, too. I want to raise my children in Reading, near my mum and dad, and I want to take them stargazing instead of going to church. I want to have a bunch of dogs, like I did when I was younger.”

“That sounds nice,” Don says.

“For me,” Lily counters.

“Yes,” Don agrees. “For you.”

“I think,” Lily says, hesitantly, “it needs to be said: we’re not terribly well suited, in the long term.”

“That’s probably true,” Don says, feeling the weight on the conversation somewhere in his ribcage. “I’m sorry - about that.”

“I don’t think we should drag this out,” Lily says. “I think it would be better to get the difficult part over with now. Maybe,” she says, wavering but courageous, “maybe then we’ll be friends again by June.”

“Of course we will,” Don promises, like an oath. 

-

“And the thing is, it really ought to be bloody awkward - Nate thinks it is - but mostly I’m still preoccupied worrying about what I’ll be doing at the end of this year,” Scripps says, staring into his pint. 

“Scripps, mate,” Dakin says, “have you fucking lost it?”

“Cheers, thanks. You do a man wonders, Stu.” Scripps is increasingly unsure why he’d thought coming to the pub with Dakin was a good plan.

“I knew you were masochistic, what with the celibacy, but I hadn’t imagined it reached quite this level. It borders on farce, practically,” Dakin informs him. “Are you deliberately trying to make yourself feel unhappy over some girl you broke up with?”

“I think, technically, she broke up with me,” Scripps says. “And she wasn’t ‘some girl’ - we were together a year. It’s significant.” 

“Sure,” Dakin says, “but were you planning on marrying her?”

Don thinks, with some faint wistfulness, of Lily’s hypothetical stargazing children whose father he will never now be. 

“No, you weren’t,” Dakin continues. “And it isn’t as if she’s the only one out there. If you’re not sad, it’s for the better.”

“How are you so sure that I would never have proposed?” Scripps asks.

Dakin raises his eyebrows. “Aren’t you supposed to be the one who’s the keen observer of human nature?” he asked. 

“Well, apparently not,” Scripps says. “I also apparently completely lack self-awareness.”

“I can reliably inform you that is not in fact a new trait,” Dakin says.

“You are a complete arsehole, if you were wondering.”

“I wasn’t, though, by the by, no points for originality on that one,” Dakin replies blithely. “Look,” he adds, more serious than usual, “I never really thought you were in love with her and now you’re basically saying the same thing, aren’t you?”

“It’s not that simple,” Don protests.

“No, sometimes it is simple. Sometimes people just don’t end up together. It’s fine, move on. Surely there’s someone out there worthy of your,” Dakin now curls his lips in mild distaste, “devotion or whatever. Someone human, that is.”

“Sometimes,” Don says, studying his friend, who has flickered back and forth between deeply known and strangely unknowable multiple times over the course of this one conversation alone, “I don’t really understand you.”

“I don’t think most people really understand each other,” Dakin says. 

Scripps isn’t sure what to make of this. 

“Cheerful, that,” he mutters, before finishing his pint.

-

The melancholy and listlessness does come after a week or two, though Scripps is aware, and embarrassed, that he’s also mourning the sense of stability having Lily at his side gave him.

“I brought biscuits. And Layla somewhat mysteriously has a copy of _All the President’s Men_ on video, so I have that as well,” Posner announces, as Scripps lets him into Scripps’ rather messy flat.

Scripps can’t help his half-smile, half-frown. “How exactly is a film about about the Watergate scandal supposed to cheer me up?”

“Who said that was for you? I’ve already brought you biscuits, haven’t I?” Posner says, pulling out a sleeve of milk chocolate biscuits from his rucksack and dumping them on the tiny fold-out table. 

“Anyway,” Posner continues, collapsing onto the second-hand couch Nate had brought back from Oxfam some time in October, “it was between this and West Side Story, which struck me as an unfortunate choice given the circumstances. Besides, you love anything that involves people striding around purposefully in the name of truth and justice.”

“Didn’t have any other plans,” Scripps concedes. Nate’s out for the evening and after the incident with Dakin, Don hasn’t much been in the mood for the pub.

“Good,” Posner says, getting up to fiddle with the beat up television. Scripps is a bit concerned about this. “Go on, sit down, I’m not going to break it,” Pos says in exasperation.

As Dustin Hoffman tucks a phone between his shoulder and his ear, Don says, “Thanks. For coming over and everything. I’m doing fine, you know. It was quite possibly the most strangely anti-climatic break-up there could be.”

“Good,” Pos replies, eyes still on the screen. “I’m glad you’re well. God, Robert Redford’s ridiculously handsome in this, isn’t he?”

“Yeah,” Don laughs slightly. “He is.”

And for another fifteen minutes, that’s all - just the bustling floor of the _Washington Post_ and slightly melted chocolate and an old friend. Then Posner shifts and speaks again.

“Can I tell you something?” Posner asks, turning towards Don, as Robert Redford looks around a dimly lit carpark.

“Something not about Robert Redford’s attractiveness?” Don asks.

“Yes.”

The solemnity of Posner’s tone forces Don to pay attention. He reaches out to pause the film.

“I sent in my applications, for my research, over the holidays,” Posner says, twisting his intertwined fingers into what looks like a somewhat painful shape. “Proposed a project about the impact of late nineteenth and early twentieth century British archeological expeditions on British culture. I’m not even convinced it made sense, but I think it might work. Dr. Velasquez thinks Durham might be likely.” He stops, but then adds, “Wonder what Mrs. Lintott would think of that.”

“You could always ask her next time you’re home,” Don says. His mouth, he finds, is abruptly dry.

“Yes,” Posner says, drawing out the word. “Though I am more curious what you think, at the moment.”

“I think that’s brilliant,” Don says, still flustered. “Why didn’t you say before?”

“I am, now,” Posner mumbles. “I had this paranoid idea that if I talked about it too much, something terrible would happen. And then after, it didn’t seem a good time.” 

“Look at you,” Don says, shaking his head and elbowing Posner gently. “Doctor Posner then.”

“God willing and all of that,” Pos says, prematurely sardonic about the prospect. “One does have to do something.”

“That is probably correct, yes,” Don says, unable to keep from smirking. 

“Oh, shut up,” Posner mutters. “C’mon, I want to get to the triumphant end,” he says, nodding at the screen and kicking Don lightly in the ankle. 

Despite his best efforts, Don drifts off before then and Posner only shakes him awake as the credits roll. 

“Sorry,” Don says, contrite despite his grogginess. 

“Go to sleep,” Pos chides. “I can walk out by myself.”

In the morning, Scripps finds two book sitting on the table by the couch - Posner’s collection of Yehuda Amichai and a torn-up copy of _100 Love Sonnets_ by Pablo Neruda. 

There’s a scrap of paper tucked behind the front cover of the Amichai, with a message in Posner’s slightly messy handwriting.

_Don,_

_Sorry it took me so long to finally get this to you. As compensation, I’ve thrown in some Neruda as well. I don’t know that you’ll be in the mood for sonnets at the moment, whatever you may say, but I find sometimes that picking at the scab actually does help - to use a metaphor I rather regret, having written it._

_D.P._

Don has hundreds of pages of reading to get done. But that can wait, he decides, at least for a few hours.

-

Over the Easter hols, on the train back from London, Scripps is somewhat surprised to open his journal and find he hasn’t properly written in it in weeks. The last pages are filled with notes, but on deadlines, assignments, reminders to himself of social engagements, the odd political jotting. 

_This seems as good a time as any to begin again - right before an ending. Although that’s overly dramatic. Three years is the same measurable amount of time no matter how it’s spent._

_I don’t know that I’ve had a dramatic transformation. It’s odd to think of who I thought I would be by the time I finished, back before I started. I’m not that dreamt of man. I still hang back and wait too long. I still don’t know anything worth knowing about wine. I probably know less poetry than I did before, though I’m better informed about the current day and age._

_I feel a greater sympathy for myself at eighteen than I ever did then. I wonder if we could meet, whether my younger self would like me._

_I read that short story, “Borges and I,” last week. The one where Borges (or the narrator, also named Borges? difficult to decipher, though one presumes that’s the point) meets himself on a bench, so that thought’s not even my own, really. I suppose self-reflection is on the mind. Hard for it not to be, when I’m about to become Don Scripps, who went to Oxford._

_I went for an interview in London, today, at one of the national papers - a junior reporter position. It would be decent, both in terms of reputation and compensation. I want the job, somewhat to my own surprise. Better to be employed than not to be._

_I suppose there’s always the off-chance hope I’ll end up being the next Bob Woodward, despite concerns about the integrity of my choices._

_Abby thinks it would be exciting, at least. She wants to come down to London next year for university, to read anthropology. Mum and Dad are baffled, though still less than they were by my adolescent love affair with the Church._

-

And then somehow, it’s Trinity term, and mid-May, and all the conversations Don seems to have are marathons of self-contemplation and anxiety. 

“So, three years at Oxford - what skills do we have?” laughs Beatrice.

“I can fall asleep pretty much anywhere,” Layla says thoughtfully. “I really think I fell asleep standing up once, in Blackwell’s.”

“Narcoleptic, this one,” Akthar agrees. “I can confirm that. I suppose Beatrice taught me which is the fish fork and which is the salad fork. Don’t know that I’ll ever need that knowledge, but I have it now.”

Beatrice raises her wine glass in a mocking salute. 

“I’ve written all my essays this term playing that New Order album on repeat, so now I’ll probably always associate the excavations of historic Troy and Solomon Schecter’s work on the Cairo Genizah with synthesizers, which seems inappropriate, somehow,” Posner says, squinting at the ceiling. 

“I made a joke about Nietzsche and eternal recurrence last week and people actually laughed,” Don adds. “So, there’s one down for becoming a gentleman of Oxford.”

“Did you?” Posner asks, impressed. 

Don nods, grinning. He’s still inordinately satisfied about it, honestly. 

“But! But there’ve been other things, too,” Layla says. “We can’t forget that.” She’s been drinking more wine than usual and is a bit emotional. “I mean, I don’t think I really knew who I was, before, y’know? And now I’ve feel like I’ve started, at least. And I met all of you. That matters too.”

“Layla,” Akthar says, half amused, half indulgent, “isn’t it a bit too early to start crying? Wait until after exams, at least.” He puts his arm around her shoulders anyway. 

“Shut up,” Layla says, laying her head on his shoulder. “I’ll do whatever I want.” 

“Amen,” Beatrice says. “Lay down the law.”

“I wish you both were coming to London with us,” Layla says, suddenly, head swiveling between Posner and Beatrice.

“God, I don’t,” Beatrice says. “I’d have no excuse not to go home then. Glasgow’ll fit me well enough.” 

Akthar flicks a bit of dust towards Posner, who makes a face. 

“And Posner’s an adult,” Akthar says. “He can take care of himself, even in Durham.”

“Besides, someone has to keep an eye on the North for the rest of you defectors,” Posner says, eyes flicking between Akthar, Layla and Don with faux-disdain. 

-

When the end of Don’s time at Oxford comes, it is mostly a blur - everyone in their gowns, with family members trailing behind, carrying cameras. 

Don’s fairly certain he’s had more photographs taken of him in this one day than in the past several months combined. His face hurts a bit, from smiling. 

At some point, when Don sees him, Don says, “This is a very strange experience,” to Posner, who distractedly replies, “Yes. God, I’m really hungry. I never had lunch. Did you eat?”

“Abby had crisps in her purse,” Don says. “I had those.”

“Smart girl,” Posner says. “Here, your collar needs fixing.” 

Their hands brush, both reaching to straighten Don’s collar. Much of what happens that day melts together in Don’s memory, but that stands distinct, vibrant.

And then: London.

-

After a few months, London isn’t familiar, exactly, but something close to it. There’s a cafe where the staff know Don, now. When he says good morning to the assistants on his way into the office, there’s actual recognition in their affirmatory nods. 

He doesn’t miss deadlines. 

He goes to services at Westminster Abbey and at St. Paul’s, though more for the architecture and the novelty than for the hymns or the sermons. God, he trusts, understands this. (His crisis of faith had, after leaving Oxford, evolved into a rather sedate lack of passion about the Church, which made him like most Anglicans, probably.)

He finds himself oddly fascinated by the British Museum’s collection of clocks and automatons, though he can’t quite articulate why, later, on the phone with Posner, or at the pub with the other junior reporters from the National section. 

It’s winter and the new year and then slowly inching towards spring.

Only slightly to his own surprise, in February, he goes to dinner, a few times, with a man named Colin, from the Arts section. 

Kissing Colin is different than kissing Lily was, though mainly because Colin’s a bit taller than Don. 

“Neruda?” Colin says, one Saturday afternoon, when he’s come by Don’s flat to say hello. He’s picked up a book from the top of a pile Don still has yet to shelve. “Good choice.”

“Yes,” Don says, reaching for it, overcome with a protective impulse, and holding up against his chest. “It actually belongs to a friend. I forgot to return it.”

Colin studies Don for a moment. It’s only a gaze, but it feels like a cross-examination. 

“Your friend has good taste,” Colin says lightly. 

That night, alone in bed, unable to sleep, the Neruda volume sitting on the bedside table, Don says - aloud, because it seems necessary, “I am a fucking idiot.”

Because there it is: a revelation, falling together. 

All the study sessions, his strangely automatic dislike of Duncan, the way, sometimes, Posner seemed on the verge of a confession. The chocolate biscuits, in the spring, the warmth of their hands touching, and the sense Don occasionally has walking around London that something is missing.

When he next sees Colin, two days later, Colin says, “Look, I’ve been enjoying this, but I do get the sense you might be a bit,” he pauses, “preoccupied.”

“Yeah,” Don agrees, helplessly. “I think I am.” 

“No harm done,” Colin says, with an easy shrug. 

This might be true on Colin’s account but is less accurate on Don’s part. He spends the next month vacillating wildly between the urge to ignore phone calls, in case it’s Posner, who might somehow discern Don’s free-flying thoughts from the tone of his voice, and the urge to call Posner himself, at any time of day, to just to hear him wryly recount some seminar debate or article read. 

He stays up too late reading _Persuasion_ , every page imbued with with a new significance now. 

_Tell me not that I am too late, that such precious feelings are gone forever._ 15 Jane, Don thinks, with a slight edge of hysteria, understood. 

He has to do something, for once. Posner had offered any number of opportunities - had left Don a book of love sonnets, even. The rest, now, was for Don to do.

-

“Hello?” Posner, thankfully, has picked up, rather than one of his housemates.

“Hiya, Pos,” Don says, jittery and half convinced he’s gone a bit mad.

“Don,” Posner - David - says, a smile in his tone. “London still standing, then?”

“So it would seem,” Don says. “You have the Easter holiday coming up, don’t you?”

“Yeah,” David agrees. “Think I’ll go home to visit Mum and Dad for a few days at the end.”

“So you’ll be around the weekend before?” Don presses. If this doesn’t work out, he’s half sure he’ll lose his nerve entirely. 

“Yeah,” David agrees slowly.

“I thought, maybe I could come up and see you,” Don spits out, before he can take it back. Once he promises something, he’ll feel obligated to follow through, at least.

“Really?” David asks, sounding pleasantly surprised. “You want to come to Durham?”

“Sure. I haven’t seen you since Christmas and that was just in passing wasn’t it,” Don says. “It wouldn’t kill me to get out of London.”

“Okay,” David says, “yeah, great. We can go to the cathedral, you’ll like it. And I’ll take you round the university. Though that’s about as much as I’ll be able to offer in terms of entertainment.”

“Sounds exciting,” Don says.

“Yes. That’s what they put on all the tourism adverts. Durham: that sounds exciting.” 

“You obviously missed your calling as an ad man.”

“I’ve actually grown quite fond of the city. It’s different than Oxford. The beauty’s more lived in, somehow,” David says. “But it’s similar, too. You only have to look around to be reminded of the ways history underlies the present.”

“That’s poetic.”

“Sadly, I definitely didn’t miss my calling there,” Posner remarks dryly. “But I do like Durham. And it’s only a half hour drive to the sea. I find that comforting to think about when I’m frustrated, or unhappy, that I could just drive out and look at the North Sea if I wanted.”

Don loves him, loves him to the point of empathy with all the centuries of terrible poets who have wanted to capture this buoyancy and have failed. Don doesn’t have the right words either. 

“We should do that, if you have time,” Don says.

“Go to the coast?”

“Yeah.”

“I’d like that,” David says, wistfully. “I don’t think we’ll have time. But we’ll see.”

-

And so Don find himself boarding a train at King’s Cross, one early April morning, books and clothes and a journal stuffed into a rucksack. 

As the train pulls steadily northward, Don attempts to distract himself with his leather bound copy of _David Copperfield_. He’s always been fond of Dickens, but he’s come to like this particular copy of his for the memories, now, of first coming up to Oxford and the boy - and he had very much been a boy - he had been, not so very long ago. It is imbued with the sense of incipiency, of possibility. 

_Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show_ , Don reads, as London begins to recede.16

-

“Don, over here!”

Don can’t find Posner, not at first, despite the yelling. And then there he is, a ways off, standing by a sad looking blue sedan that looks too old for use but also too uncool to ever be vintage. 

“Don’t tell me that’s what you’re driving,” Don says, walking over. “It looks terrible.” 

“You haven’t even got a car,” Pos replies. “I don’t think you’re in a place to judge.” 

“As long as you don’t get me killed,” Don says. 

David grins and reaches out for a hug. “It’s good to see you,” he says, as he pulls away, too soon, in Don’s slightly addled mind. 

“Yeah, you, too,” Don says, feeling a rebellious blush rising up his face. 

“Are you hungry? If you’re not, I thought we could go by the cathedral now, unless you want to go tomorrow for services,” David offers, getting into the car and gesturing for Don to do the same. 

“Nah,” Don says, “now sounds fine.” 

The cathedral is beautiful and old and Don feels a kind of awe, looking up and thinking of all the many, many people who have walked the floor before him, who all had lives - brief or extended, joyous and tragic, beautiful, mundane, human. There’s God in that, he’s sure. God in the lingering, whispering remnants of the generations of the faithful who have stood where Don now stands. 

Then David knocks shoulders with him, breaking Don out of his revery. 

“So?” David asks. 

“I can see what all the fuss is about,” Don replies. 

David smiles, just slightly, looking at some candles. “Yeah. Zainab, one of my housemates, she says sometimes she likes to come by in the afternoon, because she might hear the choir practicing.” 

“Must be nice,” Don murmurs. 

\- 

It’s night, by the time Don has gathered up his courage. 

“I have to tell you something,” he manages to get out. It helps that he can’t see Posner’s face at the moment, with the cabinet door in the way. 

“Sure,” David says easily, putting two mugs down on the crowded kitchen counter. 

“Could you maybe just - go sit over there?” Don asks, gesturing towards the living room couch. 

David walks into the living room, slowly, his eyebrows furrowed. “You’re sort of worrying me now, Don.” 

“It’s not anything bad,” Don jumps in, following David into the next room. When David’s seated, apprehensive, Don continues, “You know, I realized I still had your Neruda sonnets.” 

“Is that that all?” David asks, looking momentarily relieved and then a bit hurt. “I don’t care.” 

“No,” Don says. “That’s not all. It’s just what got me thinking.” He pauses. His mouth is dry and he has the urge to entangle his hands. “You’ve been a brilliant friend, you know. Us being friends, it’s mattered a lot, to my life. I don’t even know what I would have been like, if we’d never been friends.” 

David’s sitting up, leaning forward slightly, his eyebrows furrowed. “I feel the same, Don,” he says, his voice puzzled but comforting, affectionate. 

“I know,” Don says, because it’s true. “I know that. And I’m glad. But there’s more, on my side, and I wanted to tell you.” 

There’s a odd squeezing sensation in his throat, but he’s so close now. Don can’t go back in time, can’t give himself courage at all the times he’s lacked it before. But surely, surely he can do this, when it’s David, David who Don’s known since they were only children, David who sat next to him on piano benches and shared his snacks and his laughter. 

“ _I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where_ ,” Don recites, with the greatest understanding he’s quite possible ever had. “ _I love you directly without problems or pride: I love you like this because I don’t know any other way to love._ ”17

David’s eyes are wide and very blue. 

“I mean it,” Don says. “I love you.” It’s easier to say, now that he’s said it once before, in someone else’s words. “I’m in love with you.” 

David stands, jerkily and wipes his hands on his trousers. 

The silence is constricting. 

“Could you possibly say something now?” Don asks. 

“Don,” David murmurs. They are standing very close together, now, and David’s brought a hand up to cup Don’s face. “Are you sure?” 

Don laughs, incredulous and out of breath and painfully hopeful, feeling the warmth of David’s hand against his cheek. It’s enough to curb his initial, instinctive desire to say something sarcastic. “Really quite sure, yes.” 

And David smiles and his shoulders twitch as if he’s about to laugh. “That’s good. To know.” 

“Is that all you’re going to say?” Don asks, both impatient and terrified, even with the way David’s hand has come to rest on the side of Don’s neck. 

“No!” David protests. “Can you not give me half a moment? I only gave you literally years.” 

“I know,” Don says, reaching out to grab David’s free hand and squeezing. “I’m sorry.” 

“It’s all right, Don,” David says, tilting his head slightly to the side and grinning. “I was in love with you before I realized, too.”

And then he leans in. 

Anticipation pulses in Don’s fingertips, which he wants, desperately, to push up under David’s shirt, to feel skin. 

“Can I?” David asks, so close that Don can feel the warmth of his breath. 

“Please,” Don pleads. 

And then, even as the word escapes Don’s mouth, they are kissing. David’s lips are slightly chapped, warm, and utterly welcome. 

If he could freeze this moment, Don thinks he could easily produce the most lyrical writing of his life. 

But what Don wants to do - what he can and will do - is keep kissing David and tracing his fingers along the length of David’s spine. 

\- 

Don wakes up early because he’s cold. Groggily, he realizes they’d kicked the blanket down the end of the bed at some point in the night. 

David is curled up, stealing most of the sheets. 

Don spends a few minutes pondering whether he could take some of the sheets back without waking David, but then David frowns and mumbles into his pillow, “I’m awake. Stop staring.” 

“I’m not staring,” Don says, still quiet, almost hushed, because there’s something beautiful and delicate about this. 

David sits up, blinking, eyes hazily unfocused. His hair is mussed and standing up slightly, on one side. 

Don has to smile. “Good morning.” 

David smiles back. 

This will not be simple or easy or poetic, all the time. They live hours apart and it could be years before that changes. 

But still. 

“I brought something for you,” Don says. 

“Oh?” David asks, putting on his glasses. 

“Yeah,” Don says, getting up to rummage through his bag and carrying back a leather-bound volume to the bed and dropping it in David’s lap. 

“I know you said you didn’t mind me keeping your Neruda, which is good because I don’t have it with me. But I thought I should ought to give you a replacement copy,” Don explains. 

“Don,” David murmurs, tracing the cover, “but this one’s so much nicer.” 

“Well, the old one’s got sentimental value for me now,” Don says. “So I hope you can make do with this one.” 

David laughs. “I think I might.” 

As beginnings go, Don thinks, it’s not earth-shattering. But it’s good. 

**Author's Note:**

> References, in order: 
> 
> 1 David Copperfield, by Charles Dickens.
> 
> 2 Nature, by Ralph Waldo Emerson
> 
> 3 "The Love Long of J. Alfred Prufrock," by T.S. Eliot. 
> 
> 4 "What Difference Does It Make?" The Smiths. 
> 
> 5 "To Autumn," by John Keats.
> 
> 6 "Sonnet XVII," by Pablo Neruda, translated by Mark Eisner. 
> 
> 7 On Photography, by Susan Sontag.
> 
> 8 "A Thing of Beauty (Endymion)," by John Keats.
> 
> 9 "Song of Myself," by Walt Whitman.
> 
> 10 "The School Where I Studied," by Yehuda Amichai, translated by Chana Bloch and and Chana Kronfeld. 
> 
> 11 The Guide to the Perplexed, by Maimonides.
> 
> 12 25 Leviticus 1-25. 
> 
> 13 1 Corinthians 4. 
> 
> 14 Persuasion, by Jane Austen. 
> 
> 15 Persuasion, by Jane Austen. 
> 
> 16 David Copperfield, by Charles Dickens.
> 
> 17 "Sonnet XVII," by Pablo Neruda, translated by Mark Eisner.


End file.
